As I read over here, AMD’s Chairman W. Jerry Sanders late Wednesday made a sensational announcement to a financial analysts conference call. He said that AMD would start phasing out Duron processor family by the end of the year and Fab 25 in Austin, Texas completes the conversion from making Duron processors to becoming 100% a flash memory facility. Of course, it doesn’t mean that AMD will no longer offer solutions for different market segments. It means only that the company will position different Athlon processors as performance and budget solutions.

Although this decision may look a little bit weird at first glance, it appears pretty logical and understandable. Let’s try to figure out everything now…

According to Mr. Sanders, AMD’s major problem in competition with Intel lies not with Intel’s advantages in production capacities but with the huge difference in promotion and advertising budget. AMD is simply unable to promote two processor families at a time, and it is much easier to focus only on one of them. By the way, it is exactly the case now: remember, have you ever seen any Duron ad? I haven’t, however, as for Athlon promotion materials they are pretty numerous (not as numerous as Pentium 4 ones, certainly).

Now let’s recall the company roadmap. In the end of this year or beginning of the next year AMD is planning to announce its 64bit Hammer processors. We don’t know for sure yet if they will be selling under Athlon brand name as well, or will retain the Hammer name. But one thing is clear: the third Duron family will definitely be redundant. Look: AMD has a beautiful opportunity to sell 64bit Athlon (AKA Athlon-64, hammer, ClawHammer, doesn’t matter) in the performance market segment, and send the 32bit Athlon to the Value market segment. And everything will be OK (we are not talking about the server SledgeHammer here).

And Now let’s return to the discussion of Duron CPUs. Mr. Sanders said that the last representative of this family would be a new Duron CPU based on 0.13micron Appaloosa core, which should be announced within this quarter. The core should be made of the same die as Athlon XP on 0.13micron Thoroughbred core, i.e. the situation will be different from what we saw among 0.18micron Athlon/Palomino and Duron/Morgan CPUs, which used different dies. On the one hand, it allows reducing the production costs thanks to the production unification, but on the other to reduce the profitability of the wafers. Bearing in mind that Duron is living its last days, this actions make sense to me.

Good-bye Duron!