AMD to market discount Sempron

Sempron, thy name is bargain.

Advanced Micro Devices will come out with a chip in the second half of the year called Sempron that is geared toward notebooks that cost less than $999 and desktops that sell for under $549.

Sempron will be sold worldwide. AMD did not provide any technical details or specify whether the chip would derive from the older Duron/Athlon/Athlon XP line or the Athlon 64 line.

Both AMD and rival Intel have used bargain chips to expand their market share and insulate their premier chip brands from price erosion. In the late 1990s, Intel introduced Celeron, a scaled-down version of the Pentium, and AMD came out with Duron, a cut-rate version of its Athlon and Athlon XP chips.

Generally, the budget chips share the same basic processor core as the more expensive models, but they run slower, come with slower buses and have less performance-enhancing cache.

In recent years, however, AMD's segment marketing has become a bit muddled. The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company discontinued Duron, but then brought it back to satisfy demand in China. New Durons are now also being sold in Latin America, according to an AMD representative.

In the United States and Europe, the company has mostly used its Athlon XP chip to satisfy the budget and midtier markets while selling its Athlon 64 chip to gamers and performance buffs. The Sempron name will therefore let the company more tidily keep the Athlon name confined to the more lucrative markets.

Both Intel and AMD are also looking at ways to create even cheaper chips targeted exclusively at emerging markets. Details have been scant, but both Intel President Paul Otellini and AMD CEO Hector Ruiz have said their companies are trying to tackle this problem.

As with its other chips, AMD reached into its high school Latin textbook to coin the name. The Latin word "semper" means "always." AMD says the name will connote a chip that is used every day.

A derivation of semper, "sempra" is used in various curses in Harry Potter books, but AMD appears to have avoided any major name gaffes. This has not always been the case. Celeron turned out to be the birthplace of Lucille Ball, and Athlon is the name of a laminated panel used as a divider for bathroom stalls.

[AgeOfPenguins_com]

Celeron is not AMD

You were talking about AMD names sometimes clashing with other products (such as the bathroom stall dividers being called Athlon)
BUT you mention Celeron which is NOT AMD - but rather Intel.

Matthew

[mgcarley]

thats a bit nitpicky

That just a tad nit-picky, don't you think? The way I read the sentance, they seemed to be talking about naming blunder of both companies respectively - even though they didn't specifically mention Intel in that sentance - though it would be easy enough to confuse, I suppose, as they did mention Celeron rather than Duron, after all.

-Mathew

[Mahayani]

Leave it to the Idiots

Who cares Celeron/Duron? Ancient history. Anybody who is still running them is in the dark ages.
I've kept up with equivalencies and have forever held on to my 1.4 GHZ Athlon Thunderbird, almost equal to an Athlon XP +2700. It served me VERY WELL, like recording streaming TV with the help of an ATI All-In-Wonder 9600. Now its time to shoot for the stars. I thought I was waiting for AMD FX-55 CPU, but maybe the new FX-53 will do it. Get the 939 mobo and save a bundle on non-EEC. Look I'm not perfect, is AMD going from .13 to .09 on the FX-55, due out at the end of the year.
In any event the 939 MoBo is the way to go for top shelf processing and it seems you can interchange Athlon 64, Athlon FX processors there.