AMD's New Duron: Now at 1GHz

3D Rendering Performance

We just got done mentioning that there are applications out there with much lower L2 cache size dependencies.  3D Studio MAX happens to be just one of those applications, where the rendering of a scene is more stressful on the floating point units of a CPU that it is dependent on a larger L2 cache. 

Here the Duron performs very well.  The 1GHz Duron only has a 5% clock speed advantage over the previous generation 950MHz Duron yet it manages to boast an 8% improvement in performance in this test.  Its hardware data prefetch is most likely the culprit.