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End Of the Road for Duron
yorgasor writes: "AMD announced that their Duron processor will no longer be produced near the end of this year. They plan on focusing all of their CPU production energy on Athlons and Hammers. The Register has more about it."
Seems Duron's not as durable as it's name would suggest.
Video Game cheats, hints a
For the cash strapped, making a linux server on lower end hardware is the way to go (my server is on a P1-120MHz box). Why must they push the envelope so hard?
The lowest end CPU you can find now-a-days is like 800Mhz, unless you go to auctions...
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Has anyone noticed it's getting harder to upgrade pcs? I can't just get a new processor a year after my old one. because by then the processors seem to need new motherboards, faster memory etc...
FP!
How are they gonna own the low-end market now?
If they can price their CPU's low enough and still make money then they might even hurt intel a little more.
DURON
what about their new line???
Just heard the sad news on talk radio. The Duron processor was found dead in its AMD headquarters earlier today. No further details are available at the moment. Even if you aren't aware of its excellent implementation of the x86 instruction set, you will surely agree that it was important. Truly a gallium arsenide icon.
AMD did not officially announce that Duron is no more, they merely stated in their earnings conference call that by the end of the year they expect to be producing nothing but Hammer & Athlon.
The Hammer will be the performance processor while the Athlon will be the value processor. They were also quick to point out that by that point it will actually be cheaper for them to make Athlons than it is for them to make the current Duron and that those Athlons will be available for equivilent to Duron prices now without the Duron limitations (in other words, full L2 cache, etc.)
With that said...like all conference calls of this nature, it was forward looking and merely states their plans, not necessarily fact.
AMD waves goodbye to Duron
By Drew Cullen
Posted: 18/04/2002 at 13:13 GMT
AMD is to stop making budget Duron processors at some point towards the end of the year, when it completes the conversion of Fab 25 in Austin, Tx from CPU production to flash memory-only. That's what Jerry Sanders told analysts and press in a conference call yesterday. This was far too late in the day for us to listen, so we'll refer you to Jack Robertson's account instead. There's good
stuff on Hammer, manufacturing, and flash memory, and Sanders' testimony in support of Microsoft.
Here's some bullet points:
AMD will concentrate all CPU production - Athlons and upcoming Hammers - at Dresden and in a UMC foundry in Taiwan. Outsourcing Athlon 0.13micron production to UMC will ensure a fast ramp-up for AMD's next gen Hammer family in Dresden.
There will be one more Duron - a 0.13micron Appaloosa. AMD's 8m processors shipped in the March quarter is equivalent to 19.5 per cent market share by units. This is good performance, AMD says, especially, as it's locked out of Dell, the only growing PC maker. If Dell carries on growing market share, then AMD will find it very difficult to grow its CPU market share. ®
A good thing really. It was always kind of pointless and a little insulting to sell the same K7 design with a cripplingly small cache at a discount. I don't think the difference in die size really accounted for so significant a savings; it was a form of tiered pricing to get more out of the market.
Not that there's anything wrong with capitalism, but it always irked me and reminded me overmuch of intels old celeron/pentium3/xeon tiered caching, where you had to pay rediculously more for the same chip with different cache, which was especially insulting when the cache was off die, and the price would pentuple for a xeon over a "consumer" pentium3, which was certainly a *cough*
little bit more than the cost of the extra cache chips they stuck in the sloted model.
---
the pen is mightier than the sword, the sword is mightier than the court, the court is mightier than the pen.
This will mean a price drop on Durons still on the shelf, and used Duron processors will become really abundant and cheap.
Plus, once the Hammers are released, the price of Athlons should take a cut.
The speed of time is one second per second.
It seems that all this means is that theyre going to shift the athlons into the low end position of their market and use the hammer class chips to fill the high end void. It's just a matter of naming convention and of course getting an extra $5 per low end chip for name value.
--aiee
Why all these stupid names for 80x86-compatible processors. Be nice to future historians, use easily sortable processor *numbers*.
what kind of moron would name a processor "duron" anyways....i can see the dur-ability part of it but other than that it just sounds like some sort of plankton or something
kill me now!
AMD pricing for Athlons is much higher than Durons. All the Durons are under $100, and all the Athlons are higher. Presumably AMD will drop the price on Athlons when the Durons go away. I can't see them abandoning the low end.
2 minutes after AMD said Duron is dead. i just want to upgrade my computer! NO! you won't..... only if you have 200$ spare every 2 minutes.
-JAPAN: ol yor beys ar bilong tu as! -AH!
The AMD Chairman also hinted that Microsoft Corp. may be working with the firm on developing a 64-bit operating system extension to the existing 32-bit Windows versions for the Hammer series. "We gave working (Hammer) samples to Microsoft. We have them working code. Microsoft now must make the determination what to do and when," he added.
Maybe not after his testimony this week!
When processors cost $300 and up on average, having a budget processor line was important. Now that a lower-end Athlon processor (the Socket A 950) is all the way down around $70, it's more worth while for AMD to just produce Athlon series chips in the 32-bit world. Heck, the top-of-the-line processors are generally right around the $300 that used to be an average selling price!
Fewer chip lines=more efficient production=lower costs=lower prices on balance.
Intel's pretty much done the same thing, except they've all but killed the P3 in favor of the Celeron at the low end.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
On the other hand, AMD's pricing hardly justifies a value processor, since compared to Intel processors they are already pretty cheap.
If they widen the XP line just a little bit by extending the slower models lifetime a little, they can fill the gap the Duron leaves behind with the XP itself.
Also: when the Hammers arrive, the XP will fade away and presumably act as a value processor for a while. A Duron as an even cheaper CPU wouldn't make sense in such a scenario.
Another reason I can think of, is that it doesn't make so much sense to make a CPU with a 100 MHz FSB. With today's materials this will probably not be cheaper to procuce than 133 MHz parts. So you're actually producing less than you can for the same cost, just to create a difference between models. Essentially the smaller L2 cache is the probably the only difference in cost of production between the Duron and the XP.
An Athlon Tbird 950 is only $58
The Athlon XP 1500 is only $93
These prices are from newegg.com
By the time the Duron is canned that XP 1500
will cost about $60.
Are you really that strapped for cash? To quote Chris Rock, "I got two jobs, you can't get one?"
So will they call the chip that implements DRM in hardware the 'Screw driver' ?
...lay off the Celerons (now that AMD is pulling out of the economy proc. market), especially the first ones (CPU without a cache anyone?) and the world would be a whole lot better place...
Live for the present, learn from the past, and dream of the future!
When you look at pricewatch there's no question the AMD chips offer lower prices for comparable chips. Now it looks like they're going to dip to even lower prices. When they dedicate the Duron production lines to producing Athlons its going to make an impact on their prices. As for public perception let me ask this... Didn't it always seem that AMD Athlons got better exposure than Durons? Duron budget systems were always rare in big name systems when compared to Celerons. Which is a shame. I'd love to see AMD develop a healthy market demand across the board from econobox to server. Given the choice though I'd like better cheaper server processors though than a cheaper low end PC. The community's thoughts?
http://www.siliconstrategies.com/story/OEG20020417 S0077, as linked to by the Reg article. Rehashed rehash, that's slashdot!
--j
Looks like AMD will only be producing flash memory within the united states now. I have some friends who work at the Austin FAB and I know that their future is uncertain. RIP Duron, long live the Hammers!
-- Adam
The Slot 1 Pentium 2 and 3 had off chip SRAM
caches that ran at half the speed of the CPU.
The Slot 2 Xeons had full speed cache that
intel had to manufacture themselves because the
normal SRAM vendors didn't sell 400MHz and
faster SRAMs. That's one of the reasons that
the cost was much higher. The second was of
course that they could rip off businesses who
both a) could afford it and b) compared it to
sun and it was still cheaper than an UltraSPARC
I'm actually surprised that AMD came out with a lower-end chip at all, when its high-end chips are cheaper than their competitors low-end chips. It's weird, it came into a market where people were expecting to pay a few hundred bucks for a decent chip and offered decent chips for under $100.
Reminds me of a story: A woman wanted to sell jewelry in a kiosk. The jewelry was cheap to make so she priced it accordingly. She could conceivably sell her earrings for 5$ and make a profit. She was doing lousy. One day someone with a little business sense told her to arbitrarily mark it up to 25$ for the cheapest-looking ones, and even more expensive for the others. After doing this, she sold out her stock like lightning and had to take more orders.
Funny how the human mind works, isn't it? The Duron chip is cheap, gets little negative press that I know of, and is being produced by a company held in high esteem in the home PC market. So, naturally, it must fail.
I think the Duron should have been held as an ace in the hole -- although there's nothing stopping them from keeping it in mind, I guess. IBM's major response to AMD was to lower the cost of their high-end chips. If they'd responded instead with a bigger push for the Celerons, maybe the Duron would have had a better chance...
--------
Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
Do we hate AMD today?
I thought they orginally said quarter 3 for hammers...
I wonder if they are really ahead of schedule.
I'd love to see some Hammers in Sept-Oct. I've been putting off buying anything new in anticipation of this "next big thing"
First I decided to get a VLB mother board. Just after the purchase PCI won the market. Then I chose to buy an Aureal sound card. And just after that, the Aureal died. Then I got a Voodoo3 video card and that also died a horrible death. And now... just after purchasing an AMD Duron and a new motherboard, they claim that there will be Duron no more. Damned... Either I'm a bad decision maker or then I'm an angel of death. Too bad there is no place to bet for the loser because I'm going to buy a new monitor...
thats right kiddies, it's time for dual processing the cheap way. get yourself a cheap-o Tyan Tiger MPX motherboard (http://www.tyan.com/products/html/tigermpx.html), and wait for those duron prices to rocket downward; then get yourself two 1.3GHz Morgans and some nice CPU heatsink/fans (i think the Thermaltake Volcano 7+ should do nicely - http://www.subzerotech.com/reviews/hsf/volcano7+/) and a case that's compatible with this dual mobo (most 300W+ power supply-enables cases, but might need to get specific). then load all the crap from your older system into this one and you've got yourself a kicking cheap dual processor system. i think the last quote on the heatsinks, processors, and case together was below $400, but will fall even further down with this news. and dont even get me started with overclocking....
I don't know why this made me think of the Radio Shack Color Computer, but it did.
Seems like the Duron and the Celeron (DX/SX, etc) are just crippled versions of the "better" Athlon and Pentium x.
Much like back in the late 70s when Radio Shack was designing their more affordable Color Computer they anticipated it to have 32k of ram using 16k RAM chips and designed the board for those chips. The chips didn't actually exist when the board was designed, but they *knew* as it was rolling down the assembly line the 16k RAM chips would be available.
Murphy has taught us well and true to form 16k RAM chips were not available. The chip manufacturers skipped 16k to 32k! So instead of
their "low end" computer being built with 32k total it had 64k total. Which was 16k more than their "high end" model!
Solution: break the most significant address line.
For the same cost to the company they produced a bit less than they marketed and sold. (yes, pun intended.) For the sole intent of keeping the price of the high end model inflated.
This is exactly what intel did with the 486's. They made DX processors and applied too many volts to the FPU and blew it out. (blown out as in destroyed not to be confused blown out as in programmed with PLA).
I guess now the trend is going to be low-end 32-bit, high end 64-bit. This is considerably less less transparent to the programmer. And I am not quite sure how this is going to benefit AMD's venture into the 64-bit arena.
The List of Grievances with Slashdot.
I personally see this as a good thing. Celerons and Durons have always been labelled "cheap junk" in my mind. Sure there're not bad, and they're great if you're building a system for someone who doesn't know the difference, but if discontinuing Durons made AMD's others cheaper? I'd go for that...
Really now, does anyone honestly believe a Duron is as a good as an Athlon? I think my Athlon 750 is equal to or better than a Duron 850.
Sigs pose an operational security risk and help the baddies aggregate data. I guess commenting does too, oops.
One of AMD's critical weaknesses is a lack of fab space. They have very few fabs available to them, and they need to very carefully select which fab will produce which silicon. (This is actually a common issue with silicon fabs, since a new fab runs $3B or so nowadays, but AMD has a really bad space shortage problem for the size they are)
If you look at the AMD roadmap the future is the Hammer series - which incorporates the x86-64 instruction set - and Barton, which is allegedly a hyped up Athlon on a smaller core (0.13 micron) with no x86-64. Barton is being poised as the low end processor, while the Hammers are high-end.
With that in mind, where would a Duron fit? Realize that AMD is currently losing money. Ridding themselves of Duron not only frees up fab space, but also allows them to move the entire processor cost structure up a notch or two.
The current bottom end of the market is probably going to disappear, since the Celeron doesn't have much life in it either. But since they're already unpopular in the retail market, it's not a huge loss. If you want to build a cheap system, you're better off buying components that aren't brand new anyway. Swaps, ebay, and so forth are dirt cheap on those kinds of things.
I can see why, with the pricing of lower-speed Athlons, but I thought the Duron was a nice foil to Intel's Celeron. My last purchased box had a Duron in it -- never a hiccup. .... sniff .... Duron, we barely knew ye'
...we are from the government - we are here to help...
And now I see people are talking of "Hammer." Well, what the hell is that? Better? Is Duron better? What? And what is K7? Same as Athlon, or Duron? K6? Does that even have a name?
Now on pricewatch.com (http://www.pricewatch.com) I am seeing all of these "variations" like 3DNow, XP, MP, "tbird" (I guess that's "thunderbird", which means...?). Sure, know what MP is, fine. Isn't 3DNow just some fancy registers or instructions or something from the PPro?
What the hell? Why not give them some kind of straightforward numerical name? Look at Intel: 486 > 386 > 286 > 086 and P-IV > P-III > P-II > P. And Motorola: 040 > 030 > 010 > 000, 604 > 603 > 601, G4 > G3. Now those make sense.
Even those of you out there who know nothing about computers are not such complete morons to not understand Intel and Motorola naming schemes! So how much stupider had to the AMD employee have been to come up with this?!? :(
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
Why all these stupid names for 80x86-compatible processors.
Because a chip vendor can trademark a name but can't trademark a number. Thus the move from "386", "486", etc. to the "Pentium®" line.
Did you know? Intel applied for trademark registration for "Sexium", but the CDA forced the company to sell 686 processors as "Pentium II" instead.
Will I retire or break 10K?
How could Intel manufacture faster memory than the companies that are SPECIALIZED in producing state-of-the-art memory chips?
Where Duron's gone or how it fares
Nobody knows, and nobody cares
Dude, you're way off on your pricing
I bought a 950 duron(socket A) for $42 at newegg.com over a month ago.
The top line Athlons cost about $200 a little more for the top one is around $250
I'd say the average processor costs about $150 or less.
And for all those whiling about upgradabilty?
I bought an ECS motherboard for 50 bucks that takes both SDRAM and DDR and put a forty buck chip in it, picked up a ECS video card for another $50 and I have a screaming workstation for cheap.
Plus when payday comes I can lay out some cash for DDR ram and have a great boost in power, then later I can get a fast athlon for around $100 (currently 1.4ghz) It's all in the planning your upgrade path guys.
pending committee review
And why exactly aren't they out there making a killing by selling this incredible miracle memory to the masses?
AMD is sexy and I believe that this will not hinder their sexiness and will possibly even increase how sexy they are.
C'MON (SCORE 5:INSIGHTFUL)!!!!!
I remember the Archimedes processor ran BASIC 100 times faster than calculated, then they found that their refactoring of the BASIC interpreter decreased its size so much that the whole interpreter fit in the CPU's L1 cache. ARM processors I think it is - RISC.
Can Transmeta pull off any miracles like this, such as using a JIT compiler to translate the entire executable app instead of just doing it in the background like they're doing now?
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
Sorry, Intel, not IBM.
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Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
The other companies could have made those caches too. There just wasn't a market for them. They were, at the time, too expensive to justify mass production. Later, after caches went on to the die, Intel made all their own caches anyhow. It's not unrealistic at all.
Silly asshole, fp's are for kids.
Mod me up I need Karma.
The so-called "crippling" you speak of is often done not by AMD, but by the laws of physics. I.e., when the wafers come out, some are damaged. Since the biggest think on the die is the L2 cache, upto 3/4th can be damaged and still sold as a Duron processor. It's a simple matter of recycling.
-- Bryan "TheBS" Smith
Independent Author, Consultant and Trainer
AMD purposely names its processors after horses because you cannot trademark them.
-- Bryan "TheBS" Smith
Independent Author, Consultant and Trainer
Next time you buy something, short the stock of the company that makes it.
** Big Disclaimer **
I am not a financial advisor and this is not financial advice. Although anyone who gets their financial advice from Slashdot probably gets what they deserve, you should bear in mind that the value of stocks can go up as well as down, and if you short a stock your maximum potential gain is 100% while your potential loss is unlimited
** End Big Disclaimer **
--
E_NOSIG
It is... it is...
Horses? I thought Athlon was some fake Greek god or sauce or something. Personally, if I were AMD I would avoid giving my CPUs names so similar to "Teflon." I don't want to use the phrase "could fry an egg on", but let's just say that there are already far too many similarities between my CPU and various cooking implements.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
Because 512K of it costs as much as 128M of SDRAM. Not to mention the fact that SRAM, while much faster and much more expensive, is also much less dense, to the point that a reasonable amount of it, like 64M, is about the size of a shoebox.
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
But just use TheRegUs instead.
Karma: Good! Napster: Baad!
If you are the angel of death, you may as well put it to some good use! :)
Nathan
The Duron's cache is not that small. People tend to forget that the Athlon/Duron has 128 kB of L1 cache. This is four times as much as the PIII/Celeron and sixteen times as much as the Pentium 4. Because the K7's L2 cache is exclusive, the L1 and L2 caches combine for 192 kB of total usable cache on the Duron, which certainly compares favorably to the 128 kB of total cache on the Coppermine Celerons.
I think the Duron owes its failure to the fact that Athlons are already so cheap as to leave no room for Durons in the marketplace. Even so, the Duron does have some advantages (e.g. much lower heat output), and it's too bad to see it go.
is me waiting for the punchline.
I think the primary reason why AMD is phasing out the Duron is the fact that outside of the do-it-yourself crowd, there was almost NO demand for the Duron CPU here in the USA, despite its technical merits.
Besides, for low-end computing Intel's Celeron had such a hammerlock on the market that there was no real incentive to use an alternative. Note that most of the major computer manufacturers still offer machines that use the Tualatin Celerons (1,100 to 1,300 MHz speeds). Indeed, the 1,300 MHz Celeron is actually a pretty nice CPU, especially with 256 KB of L2 cache on the CPU die.
support the Wintel Group, Corp.! YEAH!
amd. pathetic. it's a company based on making copies of another's (intel) product.
... AMD has announced that it will focus it's production on high-end processors. In other news, scientists predict a record year for global warming...
"Derp de derp."
You can't get caught up in the 'processor wars' too much. My home systems include:
Athlon 900 (slot, Windows) Athlon 650 (slot, Windows - gf's) Duron 700 (Linux) P166 (Linux firewall) PII 266 - old firewall PII 300 - nothing yet P100 - nothing yet
Do I need an AMD XP processor? Nope. But as long as they keep getting faster and faster, the used market will get better and better. Remember, Linux needs to be able to keep up with new hardware too, but as long as it remains backwards compatable, I'll be happy. I could run RedHat 7.2 on all of the above for one purpose or another. Try that with WinXP, NT, or 2K.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
While I'm ill-equipped to evaluate the veracity of the technical elements of your post, I am confident I can shed light on the economic point.
Spreading a single product over a wide range of market demands and pricepoints allows companies like Intel and AMD to spread the cost of making the chips over a wider range of customers. If they didn't sell a crippled chip for slightly more than it cost to make, and a normal chip for way more, then they'd have to make up the profit somewhere else. They'd have to average the profit over their un-crippled products, which means the cheapest part they made would be more expensive than a certain market segment would be willing to pay. That means they'd not get that market segment's money at all, so they'd have to increase their profit margins even more to bring in the same return on investment.
(Venturing into off-topic here...)
It's a little like insurance. Insurance companies will charge everyone as much as they can so they can insure as many people as they can. Own an expensive car? You can probably afford expensive insurance. Nevermind that you may statistically cost the insurance company less (or not, as the case may be).
Much of what we identify with capitalism, religion and government is really just ways of spreading our challenges out so that the pain of any one member of the group is well below his or her threshold of intollerance. This helps the social organism and the individual survive traumas which would otherwise threaten the survival of the individuals and the group.
Now, that's not to say that any of these particular systems is best. Nature adapts, and as long as we exist we will keep improving on what we know. I'm just saying that what looks from first glance to be simple greed actually serves a greater purpose in a bigger context....sometimes.
i'd just like to say that I could kick ken's ass any day of the week using Ryu. Any day week and twice on sunday.
Athlon? ... BTW it's trademarked by AMD...
... sound's like a Ford ...
... a few pounds ...
... about 22 pounds ...
Thunderbird?
Clawhammer?
Sledgehammer?
Now ... CODE NAMES for the CPUs are a different matter ... AMD shows us what the codenames are ... in italics. These are the cores that make up the CPU. So, what's the difference between Thoroughbread and Barton? Cache size for one ... but probably slightly different architecture for performance.
One thing to note ... Clawhammer and Sledgehammer ARE the codenames ... but probably be the product names when they come out.
Karma? Karma? I don't need no stinkin' karma.
When I was upgrading my P3 600 mhz, I thought about getting myself a new P3 chip to stick in the same mobo, but looking at the prices I found that it was the same price to get an Athlon XP 1700+ (that's about 1.4 ghz) with a new motherboard as it was to get a 1.2 ghz p3. It looks like Intel prices may have fallen a bit since then, but still, AMD chips are just absurdly cheap.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
As for diamond jewelry, that is the selling of what is a reasonably abundant mineral if you are willing to dig a lot of rock in certain geologic zones, but there is this company called DeBeers whose business plan is selling this stuff to guys who think that can recreate their honeymoon with it.
Now, whether my home computer has a Duron or a P4 in it I don't really think is going to affect my wife's general satisfaction level.
Did anyone actually use the Duron? I don't know anyone with one, and all the prices I saw were no cheaper than the Athlon at the same clock speeds.
No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness. --Aristotle
More and more people I know are switching from Intel-based solutions to AMD-based solutions. Losing the questionable Duron market won't be much of a problem for AMD, I think.
:p
Questionable? Yes. I wouldn't consider building a box with a Duron. Indeed, the only Duron I have is in my laptop.. Quite simply, because my laptop doesn't need the power of a full fledged Athlon.
What I'd love to see AMD do is work on a low-heat processor, even if it is lower powered. I do think there would be a market for something like that.. Frankly, my laptop isn't a laptop. If it were on my lap for any amount of time, my.. assets would more than likely melt off.
M.C. or just Mike?
Ok, bad joke, but someone had to say it.
No, wait they didn't...
Then you will really this this article. It is some speculation that AMD might enable 64 bit instructions on all (new) platforms.
salesman: Sir, do you want this 2 Ghz 32 bit PC or this 2 Ghz 64 bit pc?
Since the slowest CPUs today cost less than $100 from a price perspective it does not matter very much they are way more powerful than needed for many tasks.
What I find annoying is that is still hard/impossible to buy a SMALL, SILENT and CHEAP system. My iPod has probably enough hardware resources to replace my Dual P90 Firewall, if it had two network cards...
There are small (5 1/4 inch) systems available, but they cost more than $1000, and they are not silent.
Cyrix C3 runs at 700MHz+, costs less than $100 and fits in a standard Socket 370 MB. That is more or less the first i386 processor you can run without much cooling since the early pentiums. Why cant someone put such a processor, 256Mb of ram, a silent slow disk, vga, nic and ethernet into a small box (no extreme design, just something slightly smaller than a minitower).
Of course the coolest thing would be if Apple put a G3 in such a box (like a budget cube), but that will of course never happen.
is awesome.
you probably shouldn't have read this.
Actually, if you had spent the money on faster processors when you got the system, what upgrade could you do now?
If you had gotten dual 1GHz P-IIIs rather than 800MHz, and you could now only upgrade to 1.2GHz, it wouldn't be worth the money in terms of performance increase, just to gain a 20% boost. You got a 50% boost only because you went cheap on the original CPUs. You would have been able to get a 100% boost if you had gone cheaper and gotten 600MHz originally.
I'm more impressed with the fact that the board supports 2GB of RAM, which you have now, up from the original 1GB.
C'mon I'm sure you can find some !!
How much frigging cheaper than $40 do these cheap bastards need a processor to be before they buy one?
Hell, at some point, shipping is gonna cost more than the chip.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
It was only in August that the K6 was discontinued. Of course they plan to continue shipping K6-II's and III's through the year 2003 to embedded-type customers with contracts. (It really is an excellent low-power processor for such applications, though a new design would almost certainly use one of the VIA C3's.)
If you want more than a minor incremental upgrade and you wait to upgrade to at least double processor speed for the most bang for the buck, you will be replacing the motherboard, possibly RAM as well if that's changed.
Cases on the other hand seem pretty stable since the switch to ATX. Consequently it's worthwhile investing in something that's easy to work with and doesn't leave you bleeding afterwards. It also doesn't hurt if it looks good. I like the all aluminum Lian Li's. Easy to use, and most look pretty decent as well.
So eliminating the duron makes sense from a sales standpoint even if the duron is cheaper to make than athlon. And as others have pointed out, AthlonXP chips are dirt cheap anyway.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I suppose this means the AMD Moron is coming after all.
m l
Remember the article? BBspot was saying this for quite a long time.
http://bbspot.com/news/2000/5/amd_moron.ht
"Evil will always triumph because good is dumb." -- Dark Helmet
AMD is following a similar path Apple takes with their computers. One day they use the best processors available for the high end, the next day they bump those processors to the low end and get new processors for the high end. It happened a few months ago at Apple, when the iMac gained the G4. Whenever the G5 is released, it will go to the top models first. Apple has, for the most part, always done this...
All the crap they did to Worf was just too much! The Empire is better off without them.
i must admit i'll kinda miss the klingon-cleavage of Lursa, tho...
GMD
watch this
I worked at Intel a number of years ago (ducking to avoid the rancid tomatoes) when they first came out with the ranch flavored Celeron line.
Celeron was created to compete with the lower priced AMD's of the day.
Not too long after that, AMD came out with the Duron to compete with the Celeron. I never understood why AMD didn't just keep around the older chips longer and sell them to people for less. Wouldn't this be more cost effective?
For example, at http://www.lsmicro.com the oldest AMD chip you can buy is a AMD XP 1700+ for $109.99. If they still sold the 1Ghz Athlon for $30.00 I bet a lot of people would be willing to buy it.
If AMD concerned about being able to enlarge their market share in the x86 world, maybe they need to broaden their horizens. If they can do as much for PPC as they have for x86, I think Apple might be a good market for them. Especially with the problems Motorola has been having producing decent yeildsof higher end PPC chips, and IBM's indifference to the desktop markets. And then there's ancillary markets, such as the new Amigas and such. IBM and Motorola would probably be glad to have a new partner to push the chip in markets they seem to have lost interest in themselves. And it would help AMD get out from Intel's shadow.
well unless you are one of us poor kids trying to scrape together a box out of your pt job earnings, as i was (still am) about a year ago when the comparison of price/performance from a duron to any available athlon was pretty favorable. I've been using the same box since then: duron 650@866
when building a value machine, esp. for most of us on a budget, as little as $20 does make a difference.
ahh... but he/she did not get 50% increase, maybe 20 or 30. dual systems are still a waste, without a really go OS to go with it.
I thought the new celeron was more or less identical to the old Pentium III, except with a slightly cruddier FPU unit?
I can't believe the USPTO actually let them trademark the letter I when used in relation to computers and such.
By now, the "I" trademark has little if any legal force left. Unlike with copyrights and patents, if you don't enforce a trademark by suing or licensing, you lose exclusive rights in the mark.
ObDuron: On the other hand, a paint manufacturer doesn't generally have the right to prevent a semiconductor maker from using a similar or identical trademark because paint and semiconductors are considered separate domains, even though the first hard drives' platters were essentially coated with paint.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I work in the insurance industry.
Fact: The "poor man" (since you people insist on class warfare) make more claims in volume _AND_ (as hard as it is to believe) in monetary value.
I thought this was on Enron
and then on second glance about condoms.
Oh, processors. How boring.
my duron was purchased for around 250 bucks at the time...and that was a middle-end one!
Dont ask me...Im just the bass player.
What most people don't know is that the Duron was created for a couple reasons. The first was to beat the celeron down, which is does nicely. But the other reason is that it was a way for AMD to improve yields. Thunderbird chips which couldn't pass the full cache test could have most of its cache disabled, and used fine as a Duron, this made AMDs yields make intel's down right embarassing.
I'm guessing now AMD runs the durons on its own process, since AMD has a large marketshare. I wonder if they'll introduce a cheap OEM chip version to help their yields again, or still offer the Duron in limited quantities to certain suppliers.
Joe Sixpack will not care, nor notice. His machine is slow because cheap computers come without sufficient amounts of RAM. Had the manufacturers included more RAM in their lower end systems, people would realize that the high end systems did perform so much faster that the higher price was justified.
I'm using a P3 533 mhz with 512 MB of RAM. I run VMWare to be able to access company email, otherwise I'm all linux. According to hype, this should be obsoleted and unacceptable. It isn't. Even the VMWare solution is acceptable (though not ideal). You have to wonder if there are "conspiracies" within the hardware industry that makes Microsoft appear angelic.
So, for the end user, more RAM from the manufactorers side would be much more cost effective than a slightly faster processor.
Stop the brainwash
Hi,
the price difference between these two is pure marketing. Production costs are virtually the same. As Intel dominates the market, AMD can't afford to establish a different pricing scheme. Celerons crippled (FSB) and cheap, P3s full speed and expensive.
If AMD replaces the Durons with cheap Athlon, I don't see any problem. Despite of Intel which will get problems selling their crippled stuff.
Bye egghat.
-- "As a human being I claim the right to be widely inconsistent", John Peel
That was the trick... I spent as much as I could afford. and I cut back on ram and processor speeds to throw the extra money into the motherboard.
the number one rule... spend as much as you can on the motherboard... if you have to drop back a level on the processor to afford it... that's fine.. as processors become dirt cheap within months. spend the most on that motherboard and you'll be happier in the long run AND I have seen expensive mobo+slow processor run faster/better than a fast processor+cheap mobo.
and yes.... the 2GB ability (6 dimm slots is AWESOME... but not being able to use DDR is a pain.. oh welll sdram is still available) was the major selling point... My mobo is designed for server use, no way around it... but I find that I was able to avoid every pitfall with SMP and linux because of it.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I dont know about that. I have only used linux on my machine and I have seen a remarkable increase in speed when compiling with the -j2 option (to use both processors BTW) and my BMRT rendering times have dropped significantly.
as for overall desktop performance... VMware is snappier for my hardware hacking... (Gotta use windows to hack windows-only hardware... Vmware makes sniffing serial/parallel/usb devices trivial) and I sure do wish they would enable the SMP abilities on the linux Quake3T release.... just to say I have it... not that it's needed at all.
I will not say 50% or 30%.. but I will say I have it feeling overall faster and that was my goal. (the 2G ram was for BMRT and my Non linear video editing.. You have to love firewire and DV cameras!)
I will say that in a year.. my computer will still feel faster than the Pentiuum4 3ghz machines with the 500mhz memory bus and whatever IDE abortion that is out then...because right now most people think I have prototype hardware when I boot in 1/3 the time they do and that is with the delay of spinning up the scsi drives.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I have two PII systems at home, and they are just that. You can pick up one from one of the many liquidators around. I got a Dell PII 266, 64MB, 4 gig, nic, snd in one of those thin cases for $85. Works great for some servers, they are pretty quiet, and don't generate all that much heat. I was using it as my firewall, but replaced it with a P166 system (no fan other than the PS). It is just a firewall.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
You are correct about more RAM being a better solution.
For example, my system at home (a home-built system) uses an Abit AB-BM6 motherboard with a Celeron A 466 MHz CPU, a four-year old CPU design. Yet, performance is still pretty reasonable thanks to the fact I'm running 256 MB of RAM and a 10 GB ATA-33 hard drive.
In short, for many computer users a major RAM upgrade and a switch to a faster hard drive could increase performance of the computer by as much as 50% or more regardless of operating system, since the computer doesn't need to spend so much time doing virtual memory swaps to and from the hard drive.
Actually, it'd be nice to find one for a reasonable price. There has been some work on reverse-engineering the Dreamcast's proprietary expansion port (one link provided below).
Wish Linux Dreamcast Project would finish their homepage!
Linux Dreamcast Project at Sourceforge
"Bitmaster's" Dreamcast Development page
Do a Google search too.
Heh. No I wouldn't do something like that, seriously.
That's twice in a week on Slashdot that I've seen people misspelling epitaph.
2/2 (two out of two) actually as I've not seen anyone else type it.