... demand for Athlons! According to our reliable sources, AMD failed to forecast correctly the demand for its "high-performance" (Athlon) processors and "low-cost" (Duron) processors. The company had initially planned to sell about 3.5 million Athlon CPUs and 4.4 million Duron CPUs during Q1 2001. However, after the first two months Athlons turned out not enough for the growing demand while Duron processors seemed to be selling much worse than the company had expected. And besides, VIA appeared unable to supply the required amount of KT133 chipsets...
Of course, things like that may negatively tell on AMD CPUs reputation, especially their popularity by OEM companies, which do not like it when they lack component parts (remember Intel with its "paper" CPUs).
No doubt, AMD will change its priorities in the nearest future and eliminate this unpleasant shortage. And in the meanwhile we would like to try to find out what made AMD Duron not so beloved by customers.
We have always stuck to the opinion (and we still do) that the main reason is the absence of low-cost mainboards for this processor in the today’s market. As a result, most OEMs prefer the good old Celeron even though it is more expensive than AMD’s solution, because they have a great choice of cheap boards built on i810, i810E and now i810E2.
Cheap mainboards supporting AMD Duron processors were supposed to get widely spread long time ago already, however VIA, which was the one to produce cheap chipsets for them, hasn’t yet managed to arrange their mass supplies. Really, the CPU was launched over half a year ago already, and the boards for it are just starting to crop up now (KL133, KLE133 based). Take for instance, EPoX KL133M. so, there is nothing to be surprised at, actually...