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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.
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.
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
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.
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