jamf dirigeerde ons richting X-bit labs waar men heeft gekeken of een Dual Duron systeem wel rendabel is. Hiervoor heeft men gebruik gemaakt van het Tiger MP plankje met AMD-762 Northbridge en AMD-766 Southbridge. Vervolgens heeft men een aantal benchmarks uitgevoerd met één Duron 900MHz, één Athlon 900MHz, twee Durons 900MHz en twee Athlons 900MHz om een antwoord te vinden op de volgende vragen:
Zijn AMD dual-processor systeem een rendabele variant voor een geavanceerde thuiscomputer met een enkele processor
Heeft het zin om twee Duron processoren te gebruiken in plaats van twee Athlon processoren
De tests zijn uitgevoerd met onder andere Sisoft Sandra 2001, ZD Winstone 99, 3D Studio MAX en Quake III. Hieronder de conclusie:
First of all, we have seen with our own eyes that dual-Athlon systems are stable solutions, which can be applied for a wide range of tasks. This is true for dual-Duron systems, too: as we found out, in most applications there is hardly any difference between dual-Athlon and dual-Duron systems.
To say more, in multithread applications with a specially optimized code dual-processor systems are appreciably faster. Meanwhile, in non-optimized applications dual-processor configurations sometimes turn a lot slower than their uni-processor competitors, no matter whether it's a dual-Duron or dual-Athlon system.
In 3D games the drawbacks of AGP interface come around. Still, we hope that sooner or later these problems will be settled and performance will increase.
Then, using a dual-processor system (based on either Athlon, Duron, or Pentium III CPUs) becomes very much justified if you simultaneously run several tasks, each of them being able to load an uni-processor system completely. We experienced it when watching a DivX film and making some archiving, when instead of gazing at a lazy percentage scale we enjoyed the movie.
The last question is whether it makes sense saving one's finances and assembling a dual-Duron based system. Well, it's up to you to decide, we have no definite answer. On the one hand, the dual-Duron system doesn't fall too greatly behind dual-Athlon one. On the other hand, similarly clocked Duron and Athlon CPUs differ by some $10-20 in price, which is not that much either. So, we guess it would be wiser not to hunt for trifling savings, especially since dual-processor mainboards are "a priori" expensive.