Features/Overclocking

First impressions

With the exception of the clock multiplier, the Duron 850 remains unchanged from previous Duron processors. That means the bus speed is still 200MHz (100MHz DDR) with a core voltage of 1.6V.

Here's a quick rundown of the rest of the Duron's specs:

Socket A interface
0.18-micron manufacturing process
25 million transistors on a 100mm^2 die
128K L1 cache, 64K full-speed L2 cache
Fully-pipelined, superscalar floating point engine
200MHz system bus
Enhanced 3DNow! Instructions

Future variants

In the future, AMD plans to replace today's Duron with their upcoming "Morgan" core. Morgan will feature enhancements designed to improve power consumption and heat generation. Exactly what these enhancements will entail is still unknown however. Morgan is expected to initially feature AMD's existing 200MHz bus, although it will quickly scale up to 266MHz with DDR support added just before the second half of 2001.

Clock speeds upon launch of Morgan still aren't known, although production is scheduled to begin in the second quarter of 2001. By the end of 2001, Morgan processors should be running at speeds of 1GHz.

Overclocking

While rumors still crop up from time to time of AMD's plans to prevent overclocking, they still haven't come to fruition. Like previous Duron processors we've tested were able to unlock our Duron 850 quite easily with a mechanical pencil, although a conductive pen works best.

In the past, we've had great success overclocking the Duron processor, and fortunately the Duron 850 was no exception. Just to quickly recap, we've reached speeds of 950MHz with our Duron 600, and speeds in excess of 1GHz with our Duron 700 and 800. Therefore we assumed we'd start of the overclocking with the 1GHz setting (10.0x100) and fortunately it worked flawlessly.

Slowly we cranked the clock speed up in 1MHz bus increments until we reached stability problems at 1090MHz (10.0x109). While the system ran great in Windows, it locked up in 3DMark 2000 during loop tests. Therefore we had to settle for 1080MHz (10.0x108), our highest overclock with the Duron processor to date!