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The Duron stands as the official AMD entry into budget-class computing. Though it competes directly with the Intel Celeron II in price, the Duron often beats even the Pentium III in popular benchmark tests. The Duron's processing core architecture is the same as the Thunderbird's, but AMD limits the Duron's on-die Level 2 cache to 64 KB (compared to the Thunderbird's 256 KB).
The performance impact of the smaller cache size is minimal for most popular desktop applications. The difference only arises in professional applications or for server environments, systems in which large amounts of data move between the processor and memory. In these situations the Thunderbird's additional cache memory boosts performance significantly.
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