Amd To Discontinue The Duron

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Just weeks after the re-load of AMD Duron microprocessors at 1.40, 1.60 and 1.80GHz and AMD senior executive said that the company will finally phase-out the Duron CPUs late this year. Originally AMD planned to phase them out a year ago, but continued to supply the chips to its partners until the second quarter 2003 when it sold all the remaining Duron stock to its partner Avnet. Due to rising demand for inexpensive personal computers in emerging markets the company, however, introduced some new Duron processors in August.

A report from The Financial Express web-site claims that AMD India country manager Sanjeev Keskar indicated that the introduction of the new AMD Athlon 64-series processor would have a cascading effect on the existing desktop processor line of AMD and would result in phasing out of Duron from the market by the end of this year.

Ironically, a year ago AMD also planned to kiss the Duron chips and brand goodbye and wrote a blurb on the matter of Duron as a trademark and possible return of the Duron processors based on a different core. Well, we see that AMD reloaded the Duron chips this year with different core, not with x86-64 one, as I assumed, but there are no x86-64 chips for desktop computers, are there? This probably means that AMD will return the Duron brand in future as well.

Despite of the fact that AMD Duron processors have not been really good sellers recently, the “Duron” is a pretty famous trademark and a number of end-users definitely know that the Durons are intended for office and home applications and may look for them on the market. Furthermore, the Celeron processors have been here for more than five years already and all of us know that the Pentium CPUs are for those, who want to buy a powerful machine, while the Celerons are for those, who want to save some money. When such people buy a new computer they ask for the Celeron even without considering to buy a low-end Pentium 4 or AMD Athlon XP CPU-based systems since they both are more expensive.

Since the Duron brand is well-recognised, it not only helps to sell the actual products, but also helps to show the place of a device on the market. Late this year and next year AMD will have three families of different Athlon processors and there probably will be mess with them on the market since there are a lot of people who do not read the news at X-bit labs every day and who will not be able to understand the reason of huge difference in prices of computers based on the “AMD Athlon Processors”.

With the phasing out of the Duron brand-name itself, AMD follows NVIDIA and ATI with the branding strategy: it is definitely much easier to advertise only one brand and then to sell a number of CPUs for different market segments under the same trademark. It happens with the graphics processors, and now AMD may tries to follow the steps of the mentioned companies. Even in case Duron vanishes into oblivion, there will still be two or more CPU line-ups for desktop computers, just like it always happened throughout the whole history of microprocessors for personal computers.

In the early eighties Intel supplied its 8086 and 8088 processors for very expensive and simply expensive desktop computers. In mid-eighties we had 80386DX and 80386SX: one for powerful users and one for mainstream sector. In the early nineties we had 80486DX and 80486SX, again targeting different segments of the market. In mid-nineties we had Pentium processors for the high-end personal computers and 80486DX/Intel DX4 for the others. The latter were not popular at in 1995 and 1996 and they fell into oblivion pretty soon, but already in 1997 we received our two lines back: the Pentium MMX and the Pentium II processors. A year later the former vanished into thin air and the Celeron was born.

AMD itself has never been too devoted to the principles Intel had just because their market share and the number of product families were too small to think about special positioning of different products. The co made a very wise step and introduced the Duron in the year 2000, making it easier to distinguish between the high-end and the low-end CPUs.

What will happen now? As I have told you above, in 2004 the Sunnyvale-based microprocessor firm will have two or even more kinds of Athlon processors. I have no idea, how people, who are not familiar with technology and PCs, will be able to distinguish between them and choose the one that suits best for their needs. Well, but do people really distinguish between all those GeForce FX 5200, 5600, 5800 and 5900? What the consumers do know is that the 5200 is slower than the 5900, even though the feature-set provided by the former is not the same as provided by the latter.

In case everything is as simple, as described above, why should AMD care about Duron existence: isn’t it easier to provide Athlon XP, Athlon 64 and Athlon 64 FX for various types of market segments? The problem with processors is that every family contains a number of chips working at different core-clocks. The lowest CPU in the high-end family will compete with the top processor in the mainstream lineup what is not good for the both CPU manufacturer and its channel partners. Additionally, the company needs to maintain a specific price-level on certain processors, like Intel, for instance, tries to formally sustain the Pentium price at not less than $163. Only Celeron processors are available in $100 range, while all the Pentium chips costs significantly more. This helps the company to predict and regulate its ASPs and has advantages for channel partners as well.

The situation when AMD will have four different products to offer was forced by some unpredictable coincidences and will not last long. Firstly, AMD phases out all Duron processors in Q4 2003, secondly, it will gradually phase out the Athlon 64 CPUs with single-channel memory controller starting from the Q2 2004. As a result, the company will have Athlon XP for entry-level, mainstream computers and Athlon 64 FX for performance mainstream, high-end desktops. When the Socket A dies next year, AMD will have to choose whether to offer processors for cost-effective machines under the Athlon XP brand-name, or to offer them under the Duron trademark...

source - Xbitlabs