Pros: Blows away the celeron in nearly every performance category.
Cons: Only offered in 3 relatively slow speeds: 600, 650, and 700MHz.

It appears that AMD has decided to follow Intel's lead in releasing an ultra-cheap version of thier company's big hit processor. While Intel's Celeron may have been a big success, the AMD Duron 32bit budget processor completely blows the celeron away in virtually every major important category.

System Bus
Following in the Athlon's footsteps, AMD has incorporated a 200MHz front-side bus into the core of this chip, blasting it past the Celeron's paltry 66MHz. In doing so, AMD has been able to engineer a budget chip that can actually make the blazing speed that the processor is capable of come through for the information it is supposed to process. The faster bus speed will ensure faster input and output so that the speed of the processing technology itself can make maximum efficiency with its data.

Floating Point
In the Duron, AMD has chosen to take the Intel Celeron's single pipeline for floating point numbers and add two more to increase the mathematic capabilities of the processor and so enhance it for today's multimedia applications. What does this mean for the average user? Very few people realized really how many calculations that the computer must make per second in order to run some of today's MP3, AVI, and other media formats. By increasing the processor's floating point capacity, AMD has essentially chained some extra horses to the multimedia carriage of today's users.

Onboard Cache
Unlike most "Budget" processors, the Duron does not have the onboard cache problems that you begin to encounter in low cost systems. AMD has packed on a full 192K of onboard cache, ousting the celeron by more than 20%. What this means is that the Duron will be able to process speed-sensitive and calculation intensive programs (IE, photo editors, graphics programs, and multimedia applications) with much greater ease. THe cache will serve to boost the Duron to a new level of performance, rivaling AMD's own Athlon in the Processor market.

Motherboard Support
Since the new Duron processor utilizes the AMD slot-A standard already pioneered by the Athlon, there is already a wide selection of motherboards, both ATX and AT, that consumers and buisnesses will be able to choose from. The use of the standard will make finding the correct motherboard a snap and upgrading users should not have all that much of a problem if they are switching from a slot 1 motherboard to a slot A.

As AMD has been in the computer chip buisness for over 30 years, you can count on them now to be able to provide good technical support and customer service. Because they have buisness relationships with such hardware-oriented companies as Award, Asus, and many others, you can count on the availibility of BIOS upgrades and and hardware support for many years to come.

Avaiblible Speeds
Unfortunately, the availbile processor speeds are not as great as the rest of the features that this processor boasts. Currently only offered in 500, 650, and 700 MHz flavors, the Duron is somewhat slow compared to the offerings of the Intel Pentium II or even the AMD Athlon in the consumer market. There will soon be, however, faster versions of the chip so this problem should resolve itself in the near future.

Overall
The new AMD duron processor offers users power, flexibility, and a budget cost while still upholding its promise of performance to consumers. With today's market for budget oriented computing, companies like Dell, Gateway, and IBM should soon be offering budget PC pacakges to normal consumers withing the next couple of munths. If youa re in the market for an upgrade or a new PC, the new Duron is your best bet for a good processor value.