Introduction

While we have covered the high-end crowd of the 64-bit arena, we haven't touched on what might be the 64-bit revolution for the value and mainstream users. Both AMD and Intel now produce 64-bit budget chips.

AMD's first budget CPU came in the form of the Duron series back in the Socket A days. This CPU was not only fast, but cheap too. The price in its peak was around $100 AUD for a Duron 750MHz which would power most games you wanted to play. Not only that, but would overclock as well due to the lesser cache memory not getting in the way. Next came the Sempron in Socket A which were basically re-badged AMD Athlon XP Thoroughbred-A cores with less cache.

Now that Socket A has been phased out, and no more Socket A CPU's are hitting the market, to keep budget at its best, AMD has gone to its original Socket 754 K8 architecture to produce the Sempron 64 CPU.

Meanwhile, Intel is also shipping its value based Celeron D now with 64-bit instructions. The first Celeron appeared back when Slot 1 made its debut, back when Pentium II was the unaffordable CPU of many. To keep the masses happy, Celeron was introduced initially without a Level 2 cache, this caused a lot of controversy as the CPU was extremely slow at executions. Celeron-A came out shortly after which included 128K of L2 cache rather than the 512K that the Pentium II had. The one thing Celeron had over Pentium II was the fact that its L2 cache was built onto the CPU die, the first CPU from Intel to do this. This led the way for Socket 370 as well as the later Pentium 3 CPU's on this same socket.

Celeron moved over to the Socket 478 platform based on the Northwood core Pentium 4 design, with less cache, as always. Today Celeron-D is being produced on the LGA775 format and including 64-bit instructions.

Today we are pitting the AMD Sempron 3000+ against the Intel Celeron-D 336. How will they perform? Who will win? Let's find out.