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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."
Seems Duron's not as durable as it's name would suggest.
Video Game cheats, hints a
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!
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.
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...
First I decided to get a VLB mother board. Just after the purchase PCI won the market. Then I chose to buy an Aureal sound card. And just after that, the Aureal died. Then I got a Voodoo3 video card and that also died a horrible death. And now... just after purchasing an AMD Duron and a new motherboard, they claim that there will be Duron no more. Damned... Either I'm a bad decision maker or then I'm an angel of death. Too bad there is no place to bet for the loser because I'm going to buy a new monitor...
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.
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.
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
If you are the angel of death, you may as well put it to some good use! :)
Nathan
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.
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.