X-bit labs

News Glance: The Essential Commentary on the Week’s Hottest News (page 2)

Category: Editorial

by Anton Shilov

[ 06/14/2004 | 08:04 AM ]

AMD Sempron – The New Duron Hits the Scene

The main headline of the week is indisputably the introduction of AMD Sempron microprocessors that are opposed to Intel Celeron family by Advanced Micro Devices. The main intrigue of the week are the technical specifications of AMD Sempron chips – socket type, cache size, 64-bit support and other important details everyone wants to know about the products that are expected to enter the market from day to day.

AMD vigorously defends its secrets. “More details will be forthcoming in the second half of 2004,” – is the most common answer on all Sempron-related enquiries from AMD’s official representatives.

AMD Sempron logotype from TecChannel.de web-site

From unofficial sources it becomes clear that Sempron is not the name of a chip that hits the market just to allow AMD to get rid of its “unconditional” chips, but the name of a new family of chips that will target the entry-level of the market. The new lineup continues the tradition of Duron – the previous-generation processors serving the low-end of the market and discontinued in mid-2003.

Sempron – Duron’s Return

Back in 2002 Advanced Micro Devices wanted to kiss the Duron goodbye, but returned it in mid-2003 just in order to satisfy certain orders from some emerging markets, e.g. India, Brazil and China. Eventually the new AMD Duron processors find themselves all around the world, including Europe, Russia and Mid-East, clearly indicating AMD’s desire to sell affordable processors – something for what the company was known for in the early nineties.

With the Sempron, AMD gets back on track of the inexpensive chips, though, this is hardly a negative news, as this is likely to help the company to maintain high prices on its AMD Athlon lineup and achieve excellent gross-margins with its products.

AMD Duron processor

In the early eighties Intel supplied its 8086 and 8088 processors for very expensive and simply expensive desktop computers. In the mid-eighties the industry 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 two lineups 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 the company’s market share and the number of product families were too small to think about special positioning of different products. Since the 1997 AMD has made a giant leap in the market of central processing unit and since the 1999 the firm has not been considered as a producer of low-end chips, when the original AMD Athlon processors kicked everything out of the Intel Pentium III competitors. 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. With the Sempron, the company does the same move once again, though, it is not clear for what AMD needed to discontinue industry-recognized Duron brand-name earlier.

AMD Sempron Forever

The new Sempron microprocessors from Advanced Micron Devices will be supplied in a number of flavours depending on the socket the new chips are designed for. The initial versions will be available for Socket A platforms and Socket 754 platforms, while the longer-range prospects include Socket 939 revisions of the chips. But is good for AMD to have multitude of platforms for its 64- and 32-bit chips?

“AMD64 platforms continue to form these days. The introduction of Sempron processor may indicate AMD’s plan to unify its offerings in 2005. However, right now and early next year the number of different processors and platforms – Socket A, Socket 754, Socket 940 and Socket 939 – is just too high and probably may mislead customers,” said X-bit labs’ Editor-in-Chief Anna Filatova.

Fortunately for AMD, it finally gained brand-recognition and with 64-bit trump at hands, the unbelievable product-mix is not likely to slowdown the Sunnyvale, California-based firm’s sales. In contrast, the introduction of reasonably priced offerings for originally pretty luxurious Socket 754 and Socket 939 can boost sales of the latter as quite some customers desire to have some headroom for expansion with their machines.

AMD says that “Sempron” originates from a Latin word “simper” – always. Does it mean that AMD will not discontinue the “durable” chip Duron in future? Well, we will see…