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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!
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.
why??
I bought my Dual system a while ago with a pair of P-III 800's in it.. and I just got a pair of P-III 1.2ghz's , the limit of the motherboard, for it. no problems, and 2 gig of SDRAM from my 1Gig was trivial. Geforce3 is still happily plugging away and the U160 SCSI bus still has room for another 10 drives. no problems at all upgrading over a year later..
You gotta spend the money up front to be able to keep the upgrade path open.. a el-cheapo mobo will lock you down.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.