As time goes on, AMD prepares us new surprises. Hardly have we put up with the recent announcement by Mr. Sanders about the coming end of the Duron family (see this news story), and the today’s introduction of the new Opteron name for the Hammer family, as a much more radical thing happened. If we take a look at the new AMD roadmap, we will see that Duron processors based on the new 0.13micron Appaloosa core will never be launched at all!

This info seems even more surprising if we recall what Mr. Sanders said about 0.13micron Durons, which were to be made of the same die as 0.13micron Athlon XP processors.

Frankly speaking, it is difficult to imagine how they disable a half of the CPU L2 cache from the technological point of view (for instance, by 0.18micron Pentium III/Celeron processors), but as it comes to disabling two thirds of it, I get completely lost. As far as I see it, the second task is much more complicated to carry out than the first one. Maybe it is exactly this complexity (together with AMD’s unwillingness to create different dies for Athlon XP and Duron) appeared another coffinnail for Duron processors?

Anyway, I don’t see any reasons not to believe the info taken from AMD’s official site, and it means that Duron family will stay at 0.18micron. By the way, it will be pretty convenient for AMD, as they will be able to focus on the competition between Athlon XP and Pentium 4 getting ready for the Hammer launch at the same time when they get rid of 0.13micron Duron production on their Dresden fab. And the Austin fab will keep manufacturing 0.18micron Duron processors moving to flash production in the end of the year, which is exactly what AMD has planned.