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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."
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...
If they can price their CPU's low enough and still make money then they might even hurt intel a little more.
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.
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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
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?"
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?
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...
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Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
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.
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)
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.
> Microsoft now must make the determination what to do and when
It must begin to dawn on Microsoft that adding a green meadow background and passport control to Windows is not enough reason to get many people to upgrade their Windows.
Hence it needs to launch Win 64 bit soon to create a need for upgrading. As Intel do not push Itanic 64 bit more than so-so, AMD might be the company that bring 64 bit to widespread use - and Microsoft needs that. But AMD also needs acceptance from Microsoft, without them it would be VERY difficult to sell the virtues of the special 64 bit part of Hammer.
Not only did Intel sell you its busted-up 486DXes as 486SXes, they then sold the 487 chip, whic was really... a 486DX! Plug it in and it disabled the 486SX. The things some companies do for profit...
"Don't worry, it's not loaded." --Terry Kath