The Duron is being manufactured on a .18 micron aluminum interconnect process at AMD's Fab 25 in Austin, Texas. This is alongside AMD's aluminum Thunderbirds. Like the AMD Thunderbird, the Duron will use the new Socket A form factor. Socket A is less expensive than Slot A to manufacture, and also allows for more flexible system design. There will be no Slot A Duron at all so you will not be able to use a VIA KX133-based motherboard with the Duron. Socket A is comparable to Intel's Socket 370 FC-PGA connector.

The CPU is made of 25million transistors and takes up 100mm^2 of die space. In comparison, the Thunderbird uses 37 million transistors and takes up 120mm^2 of die space. Power comes in at 1.65V at a maximum of 25A, which means the Duron consumes up to about 41W of power. That is over twice the power consumption of an Intel Celeron 600MHz, which only consumes 18W. It is also a bit over half the power consumption of the AMD Thunderbird, which consumes up to about 79W... yikes! We will discuss power usage more a bit later on.

The Duron has a thoroughly modern CPU core design that leverages much of the AMD Thunderbird's technology. It sports 64K of L1 data cache, 64K of L1 instruction cache, three independent integer pipelines, three address calculation pipelines and a fully pipelined, out-of-order, three-way floating-point engine. The actual silicon layout is different for the Duron and Thunderbird, but from an end user's perspective, the Duron and Athlon core are functionally identical.

The Celeron sports only 16K of L1 data and 16K of L1 instruction cache. Four times the L1 cache is nothing to sneeze about, and can lead to a massive performance boost. At the same time, the large amount of L1 cache may be responsible for the Duron's relatively high power usage.