I'm admittedly a little late on this one, since Frank and Bert have already run the chip through its paces , must be some sort of mental fatigue from tying to dig up Comdex news. Anyway, for those of you who haven't seen the story from our illustrious lab team, late last week AMD announced the 1.2GHz AMD Duron processor, once again going back on its promise to avoid using MHz/GHz specs for its processors. All for the best, I say, the masses ought to get with the program and start checking out benchmarks related to their intended use of the processor. AMD's official release brags that a 1.2GHz Duron processor-based system with DDR memory "substantially outperforms" a 1.2GHz Intel Celeron processor-based system with SDRAM on 3D gaming benchmarks, and even provides a 13% performance advantage versus a 1.4GHz Pentium 4 processor-based system with SDRAM on office productivity and digital media applications. Once again, you can find independent THG benchmarks in Bert and Frank's article . The 1.2GHz AMD Duron processor supports AMD's Socket A platform and systems featuring the processor are expected to be available by the end of the year. The processor itself is priced at $103 in 1,000-unit quantities if you need that many and features a cache architecture with 192 kB of total on-chip cache, a 200MHz front-side bus, a superscalar floating point unit with 3DNow! Professional technology, and hardware data pre-fetch. The Durons processors are manufactured on the 0.18 micron process.