AMD's Duron Slated For June

Devil Ducky writes: "AMD announced that they will release the Duron sometime in mid June, instead of last April. The Duron is intended to compete on price with the fabled Intel Celeron. Duron will include 128KB of primary and 64KB of integrated cache, meanwhile Athlons contain 128KB primary and no integrated cache. When released it will be available in 600, 650, and 700MHz with plans for 750MHz soon. The story even makes some quick comments on the names Celeron and Duron."

Comments

Sci-fi acid trip marketing names

[Anonymous Coward]

-I am Duron, ruler of Athlon, the fifth Pentium of Celeron, holder of the sacred Katmai, oracle of the Klamath. Step forward and speak, mortal!

-Where d'ya come up with dem names, dude?

-Silence! Your insolence must be punished! I sentence you to the depths of Xeon! You shall be devoured by the PowerPC... what? "PowerPC"? Who has changed the sacred scripts?!?

Re:Where d'ya come up with dem names, dude?

[Spud Zeppelin]

Turns out Klamath and Willamette are rivers in Oregon... since Intel is largely in Oregon as well, that makes some sense. Besides, those are just codenames anyway (along the same line, IIRC, Katmai is a mountain).

And Pentium was their 5th generation chip, so it follows a standard branding formula -- take something descriptive, and add a futuristic, newspeak ending:

pent (5) + ium = pentium.

And so it came to pass that someone at Intel probably went back to the well, and came up with these lines of thought:

"Hey we have two new chips. Compared to the Pentium, we want to convey the image that one is a God and the other a vegetable...."

Zeus - us + X - Z + on = Xeon

Celery - y + on = Celeron

And then they had their 6th generation chip to contend with. Rather than name it Sexium ("It renders pr0n sites REALLY fast") they needed to jazz it up. So when they went to talk about it one of the marketroids probably asked his kid:

"It an -ium"

Not to be outdone, of course, our friends in San Jose or Dallas or wherever their headquarters is this week faced a similar problem wanting names for the chips after their K6. So they wanted something to indicate how fast the new chip runs:

Athlete -ete + on = Athlon

Then, they discovered, however, that their trusted business model of low-cost chips had started to leak away. "Quick, get something to keep this fluid from escaping!"

Durex -ex + on = Duron

And we are where we are today. At least hypothetically.... So what's next? Maybe our friends in Phoenix will unveil a stripped-down G4, and call it "McPPC" -- playing on the whole "tasty and inexpensive" identification. Or someone will come out with a low-power mobile chip called the "Volxon" (Volks -ks + x + on).


My opinion only, IANAL.