Because they are taking aim at the value market with the Duron, AMD has specific types of components in mind for what will make up a Duron system. On the video card side, you can expect Duron systems to come with NVIDIA Vanta-class video cards. The system AMD shipped us actually came with an eight MB Vanta.
On the chipset side, first generation Duron systems will ship with motherboards sporting VIA's KT133 chipset. VIA has grand plans for the KT133's core and will follow up with a version integrating S3 Savage4 video. Not long after VIA's KT133 boards ship, motherboards sporting AMD's 750 chipset should start showing up. The less expensive 750 boards will not support PC133 memory. SiS will be entering the market with their SiS 730S chipset, which will include PC133 memory support, ATA/100, integrated audio and LAN, the fastest integrated video around (according to them), and an integrated southbridge. The SiS 730S will likely be the lowest cost chipset solution on the market and should sell in quite a large volume if SiS can produce enough of them. As for ALi, they are currently developing what they hope will be the first Socket A DDR 266 chipset.
But enough about the technology, let's see how fast the Duron is...
To kick things off on the benchmarking marathon, let's start with the 'all-important' Processor Test from the ZD Labs benchmarking suite. The Winbench 2000 CPU Integer test really stresses the L2 cache of the CPU and best serves to demonstrate the speed of its internal processing. With the purpose of testing the rendering capabilities of a CPU, 3D WinBench 2000 runs several NULL processor tests, determining CPU speed - eliminating the video card as a bottleneck.
The Duron 700MHz performs fairly well here with a score of 1.2 and it's not too far off from the Athlon 700MHz (which harbors more cache but runs at half the speed), which scores 1.32.