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Budget CPU Shootout
It is very obvious from these tests which line of budget processors is worth the money. When we can find a 1.6GHz Duron for just over half the price of a 2.6GHz Celeron and get better performance consistently in almost every test we ran, the choice is clear.
It's obvious that the long pipeline of the Pentium 4 just can't handle the crippled cache of the Celeron. With more cache misses and pipeline stalls, the processor isn't getting as much useful work done as it is trying constantly to refill the pipeline. We are seeing these results for the same reason we saw the performance gains from the P4 Extreme Edition with its 2MB L3 cache: the pipeline needs to stay full for the P4 to really shine.
The Contenders
<ul>
<li>Intel Pentium 4 1.8A $120
<li>AMD Athlon XP 2600+ (2.083ghz) $88
<li>AMD Athlon XP (Barton) 2500+ (1.833ghz) $86
<li>Intel Celeron 2.6GHz $85
<li>AMD Athlon XP 2400+ (2.000ghz) $68
<li>Intel Celeron 2.4GHz $68
<li>Intel Celeron 2.2GHz $67
<li>Intel Celeron 2.0GHz $65
<li>AMD Athlon XP 2200+ (1.800ghz) $63
<li>AMD Athlon XP 1700+ (1.466ghz) $56
<li>AMD Duron 1.6GHz $41
</ul>
Source: [link=http://www.anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1927]Anandtech: Budget CPU Shootout[/link]
It's obvious that the long pipeline of the Pentium 4 just can't handle the crippled cache of the Celeron. With more cache misses and pipeline stalls, the processor isn't getting as much useful work done as it is trying constantly to refill the pipeline. We are seeing these results for the same reason we saw the performance gains from the P4 Extreme Edition with its 2MB L3 cache: the pipeline needs to stay full for the P4 to really shine.
The Contenders
<ul>
<li>Intel Pentium 4 1.8A $120
<li>AMD Athlon XP 2600+ (2.083ghz) $88
<li>AMD Athlon XP (Barton) 2500+ (1.833ghz) $86
<li>Intel Celeron 2.6GHz $85
<li>AMD Athlon XP 2400+ (2.000ghz) $68
<li>Intel Celeron 2.4GHz $68
<li>Intel Celeron 2.2GHz $67
<li>Intel Celeron 2.0GHz $65
<li>AMD Athlon XP 2200+ (1.800ghz) $63
<li>AMD Athlon XP 1700+ (1.466ghz) $56
<li>AMD Duron 1.6GHz $41
</ul>
Source: [link=http://www.anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1927]Anandtech: Budget CPU Shootout[/link]
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