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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."
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.
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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.
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)