AMD Duron 850: Getting ready for the battle

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The Duron 850 boasts a 6% higher clock speed than the 800 we reviewed not too long ago, with a 3% increase in performance under Business Winstone 2001. 

In comparison to the Celeron 800, AMD's 850 is pushing on a 16% performance advantage here as well. 

Unfortunately, as we've seen with our UMA performance benchmarks, this advantage quickly disappears as memory bandwidth limitations (since the system memory is shared with the video memory) and 2D performance come into play.

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Content Creation Winstone 2001 shows a much more linear scale in performance with clock speed for the Duron.  The 6% increase in clock speed results in a 4.5% increase in performance for the Duron 850, which isn't shabby at all.  It looks like the Duron's scalability isn't being hampered too much at all.

The Celeron 800's 100MHz FSB helps it out tremendously here as it's only 11% slower than the Duron 850.  But for being a higher priced, lower clocked alternative to the Duron, it isn't too attractive.

The only time that the Celeron 800 would potentially be a better choice than the Duron 850 would be in a retail box that happened to use a UMA platform.  As we mentioned at the start of this review, the i810E/E2 is much more mature than either of the Duron's UMA platforms.