by Anna Filatova
12/18/2001 | 07:14 AM
As we have expected today AMD was supposed to announce its new server processor family – Duron MP. However, despite our expectations, it didn’t happen. Moreover, the Duron MP CPUs were completely removed from the once again changed official company roadmap. Also we no longer see the Value Server and Workstation market sector on the company roadmap, which was initially regarded as the application field for Duron MP processors. This way, everything signals that we will never see a low-cost server solution from AMD.
The official AMD representatives were very reserved about this fact and comments just a little bit on the quiet disappearance of the Duron MP CPUs from AMD’s plans. As we read over here, AMD considered the launching of Duron MP to be an unjustified move, as the server market sets certain requirements to the CPU performance, which the Duron processors do not comply with. We wonder what they have been thinking about before?
We believe that AMD decided to give up the idea of launching server Duron MP processors for a totally different reason: because of its low economic effect. Just like in case of Athlon MP CPUs, which are hardly any different from the regular Athlon XP processors, Duron MP were supposed to be the same Durons but officially supporting dual-processor configurations and hence costing more. At the same time, we all know that the common non-server Durons do work in pairs pretty well (see our article called Dual Duron at Home: Worth Trying or Not?). In this respect, it is quite doubtful that the few users willing to have budget server solutions on low-cost processors for home or small office needs, will be happy to pay extra money for the official dual-processor configurations support, if they can easily do without it. Especially, since Dual-Socket A mainboards based on AMD-760MPX turned out far from cheap. Therefore, the market share, which could be occupied by Duron MP processors gets really insignificant. That is why AMD didn’t see any profit in introducing Duron MP CPUs.
Moreover, a year later Athlon MP processor family will little by little move into the low-cost price category due to the launching of the ClawHammer solutions for workstations and dual-processor servers.