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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."
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.
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
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....
Plus, once the Hammers are released, the price of Athlons should take a cut.
Questionable... AMD hasn't been dropping prices recently. Because they're not making money.
The Hammer series is likely to debut at a considerably higher price than the most expensive Athlon now - a lot of pundits are saying the $500-$750 range, and a few believe $750-$1000 is more likely. After all, it was under 2 years ago that the first gigahertz CPU's came out, and they were priced at >$1000 ea.
There will be some price cuts, as there always is, but probably not the freefall that we've seen in the past few years.
I so could have told you about VLB and and Voodoo3, but dude, duron and athlons use the same MB, and its not like you'll be missing the newest drivers for the duron. Hell best you can hope for is the duron dying under warrenty, and they have to end up giving you an athlon to replace it when because they have no more durons. HEHEHE
It really depends on how you obtain your computer.
If you buy a pre-built one from Compaq, HP, Dell, Gateway, etc., then you have to accept the limitations they build into their computers. They want you to keep coming back for certain upgrades, but they really want you to come back for a whole new computer.
If you build your own computer, you can choose a motherboard that guarantees a way up. I generally view the motherboard as the most important component to spend money on, and, then, I skimp on the other stuff, such as expensive CPUs, knowing I can upgrade cheaply later on. With the right motherboard, you will have many years of cost-effective upgrades and not be bound to Dell's or Gateway's business schedule.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Duron was AMD's low end Athlon, sort of what Intel did to the Pentium with the Celeron.
The Hammer series cpus will be 64 bit extensions of the IA32 compatible processors. While Intel went with a totally new (and incompatible) cpu design for their 64 bit chips, AMD extended the Athlon to 64 bits adding larger registers and new instructions. The Hammers will be backward compatible with Athlons and Pentiums and will boot 32 bit Windows and Linux with no software patches. They can also run new 64 bit software and even run 32 bit software under a 64 bit OS, switching modes on the fly! (Sortof like the 386 and up running real mode software under protected mode in a virtual cpu box).
It remains to be seen which 64 bit design will be better, but my vote is for the hammers!
Ok, I'm being trolled. So be it.
The companies that specialise in memory tend to specialise in DRAM. Cache is SRAM. The difference is that DRAM is a bunch of capacitors, while SRAM is closer to transistors. Knowledge in fabbing one does not necessarily mean knowledge in fabbing the other.
Ahem. Read near the bottom half. AMD announced big price cuts yesterday...
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-884652.html?legacy=c net&tag=lthd
If they can price their CPU's low enough and still make money then they might even hurt intel a little more.
In the just announced Q1 results, Intel made almost one billion dollars in profit, and AMD lost several million dollars. So who's hurting who?
The Asus boards I've bought offer a number of bus speeds and multipliers that really span a wide range. For example, my older Pentium Asus board will easily handle 75MHz through 550MHz Pentiums/K6s. I recently bought an Athlon Asus board that will handle from 800MHz to 1470MHz.
My point is to buy the Athlon Asus board, for example, with one of the slower CPUs in its range. This saves money up front, and saves money later when the 1.4GHz CPUs come down in price. To get the 1.4GHz CPU initially, buy a newer model of motherboard that handles 2GHz+.
It is also important to fill less than half of the memory slots initially to leave room for more RAM later on.
To take advantage of major jumps in hard disk sizes, Asus often releases BIOS updates that follow such increases. For example, my older Pentium motherboard has a 40GB drive connected to it.
Any of the UDMA speeds are mostly hype, since the disk platter itself has a bandwidth of only 20 to 25 MB/sec. High bandwidth disk busses really shine only when a proper SCSI disk array is configured. Unfortunately, UDMA IDE doesn't support SCSI disk arrays.
Following the scheme above will make for a computer that is good for at least six years allowing for one major CPU upgrade, one major memory upgrade, and one major disk upgrade.
Granted, this plan doesn't build ultimate gaming machines, but it works well for getting the biggest "bang for the buck".
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
I own 7 Duron 950s for personal use.
With motherboards and ram, the total bill was less than $1200.
They all run great, and they were the best price/performance ratio on the low end when I bought them. There were two dips in the price/performance ratio, one was midway up the Athlon performance curve, and one was at the 950Duron with the older core. I went with the durons, since I wanted quantity over single machine performance.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
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?
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.