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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."
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
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 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?
AMD purposely names its processors after horses because you cannot trademark them.
-- Bryan "TheBS" Smith
Independent Author, Consultant and Trainer
A hand up and a foot on every chest...
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.
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.
I don't agree with you, I bought a Duron 750 and Gigabyte 7IXE4 motherboard two years ago. This was a the cheaper of the Gigabyte boards, I bought because it had two ISA slots. (A couple of old cards) I just popped in a an Athlon 1.4 mhz. Which is the limit of the board with only supports 100mhz. If I had sprung for a better board I might be able to jump up to the latest A-XP. I also had a Via 693/4 chipset board that started as a celeron 400@500mhz and upgraded all the way too PIII 1 ghz, no bios upgrades and running out of spec with a 133mhz bus. That computer served me well as a primary system in early 1999, later became backup and a file server and now got gifted to my sister.
Actually if you are willing to replace motherboards you can go much further down the upgrade path. For instance the Celeron/P3 Started life as a P-166mmx, in 1996 I think, it is an early really really nice ATX case, bought a then huge 6.4 gb WD HD, and 64mb of ram. The case, and amazingly the powersupply, zip drive and floppy disk are all 1996 vintage. This is after a lightning strike that fried a modem, video card, powerstrip, and monitor.
I also have an HP Kayak Dual PII 300 that is a dead end. Despite being far and away the most expensive system I ever bought, $6000 with my options in 1998. It does have an ATX case, but it is strangely arranged with a special(loud as hell even with panaflos) cooling system and special power/reset/speaker modules, likely requiring substantial surgery. This depite the fact that HP promises a good upgrade policy over the life the Kayaks.
Moral: Build it Yourself, and pick out a really nice case and that will be the last thing you ever need to upgrade.
PS. Back on subject with Athlon so close in price to the Durons of the smae clock speed it is hrd to justify buying a Duron for a self builder today. My new Athlon 1.4 was only 100 bucks with shipping.
I have been upgrading the same machine for over 10 years (although only my floppy is over 6 years old) and found over time that the place to put the money is on the peripherals. Purchase the best monitor, mouse, keyboard, CDRW, scanner, printer, computer box etc. Spend moderately on your soundcard and video card, and hard drive and the least money on the motherboard/CPU/ram.
I find I upgrade the first group every 4-6 years, the second every 2-4 years, and the latter every 1-2 years so this scenario leaves me with the best overall parts for the money.
Spending an extra 50% on a very upgradeable motherboard or 100% more on another 25% of CPU performance is just not worth it if by the following year I can save that budget to pay for most of my new mid-ranged board setup based specifically on price/performance considerations instead of being stuck with only what fits my old technology.
Or alternatively, maybe some people are prepared to sacrifice some unused processing speed for real tangible benefits like lower power consumption, no fans, silent hard disks.
My primary machine when at home is a P166 laptop with agressive power down on the hard disk. For the majority of tasks - e.g. email & web surfing the disk the disk is off and the machine is silent. It's also running on about 8W so it lasts a while on batteries.
My question is, why can't I buy a silent desktop machine? I have to buy a noisy power hungry machine several times faster than I want.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. (Einstein)