Right, well lets admit it AMD weren´t very good before the launch of the original Athlon, but since then they have dominated the market, since the release of this Athlon there has always been a need for a cheaper version, one with more value added, this is where the Duron comes in to play, but some of us, well we dont want to play with the slow CPUs, so AMD have released the Thuderbird, this uses the. It uses the new socket A format chip, and is basically a Thunderbird Processor is a Duron but with one crucial difference, more L2 cache. The Thunderbird uses 256K L2 cache compared to the Duron mere 64K.