REMEMBER THE GIGAHERTZ race? You know, about a year and a half ago, when AMD and Intel were vying to be the first to release an x86 processor that ran at 1000MHz? AMD ended up winning that battle, releasing a 1GHz Athlon just a couple of days before Intel released the 1GHz Pentium III. Since then, the high end of the CPU world has gone crazy, with AMD ramping the Athlon up to 1.4GHz and Intel debuting its Pentium 4, currently topping the clock speed charts at 1.8GHz.

There has been another gigahertz race quietly brewing, however. This is the race of underdogs, the race to see which value processor would first cross the gigahertz barrier. As you may have surmised from the subject of this review, AMD has taken the prize once again, brining the 1GHz Duron to market while Intel's value answer, the Celeron, sits at 900MHz.

While this second gigahertz race hasn't garnered nearly as much attention as the first, there are other factors at work that make this a very interesting development indeed. For instance, the 1GHz Duron marks the changeover from the old Spitfire to the new Morgan core. Read on to see how the new Duron stacks up.