AMD Athlon "Thunderbird" 1.1GHz

SPECviewperf has always favored the Athlon processors, and for some reason even the 1.1GHz Thunderbird can't come close to the performance set forth by the 1GHz K75 Athlon. We usually attribute this to the K75's larger L2 cache and its ability to cope with larger data sets, whereas with enough data, even the 256KB L2 cache of the Thunderbird can become a limitation. The case of the latter happening, as you can see from most of the benchmarks that we have been running is highly unlikely because of the extreme performance advantage the Thunderbird's L2 cache holds over that of the K75 Athlon.

The Duron seems to perform very well, considering its intended price point, in most cases the processor is only a couple of percent slower than the Thunderbird at the same clock speed.

The Thunderbird regains its performance advantage over its older brother in the DRV-06 viewset, and the 1.13GHz Pentium III is close on its heels. Even the Duron remains competitive with the K75 Athlons.