AMD Athlon "Thunderbird" 1.2GHz & Duron 800MHz

The Price is Right

As we mentioned at the start of this article, AMD has been beating Intel quite a bit in the price arena.  The 1.2GHz Athlon announced today is already priced, in individual quantities, approximately $200 less than a 1GHz Pentium III that was announced back in March.

As far as specific prices are concerned, the 1.2GHz Athlon is priced around $500 from the vendors we’ve seen on Pricewatch, and obviously as time goes on the CPU will drop in price as well as increase in quantity.  In comparison, the Pentium III 1GHz priced is in the $650 - $700 range. 

The 1.1GHz Athlon that was released at the end of August is now just a tad under $400, and AMD has brought the 1GHz Athlon down to around $300.  For the first time you can have a very powerful CPU that isn’t the most expensive component in your box, leaving the recent trend in graphics adapters to take up that role. 

What about the older K75 Athlons that we have seemingly forgotten about?  With no real demand for them, as well as the fact that they are based on an almost dead Slot-A interface, vendors are charging the same price if not more for them than they are doing for their Socket-A, Thunderbird counterparts. 

For example, the 1GHz Athlon based on the K75 core seems to carry a $50 - $100 premium over its faster Socket-A counterpart.  However, the 700MHz K75 Athlon and the 700MHz Thunderbird carry a similar price of $100 - $120. 

Slot-A Thunderbirds are still available, although not nearly in the same quantities as their Socket-A counterparts.  The 700MHz Slot-A Thunderbird parts are being offered generally at a small premium over the Socket-A parts.

AMD has proven to be able to turn themselves around from a company that couldn’t be counted on after blunders such as a 9 month delay in shipping the K5, to a company that lives and breathes by the ideal that availability is king; all at a reasonable price. 

Motherboards are also much more affordable than they once were, while the ASUS A7V and the ABIT KT7 are still in the $150 - $160 range, equally solid boards such as the Microstar K7T Pro are selling for under $130.

While $130 for a motherboard may be reasonable for someone who is already spending $300 on a CPU, for the Duron, there is a clear need for even cheaper motherboards. The Duron has been cut in price dramatically, down to the point where the 700MHz Duron can be had for as low as $60, and on average found in the $70 - $80 range. This is even cheaper than an equivalently clocked Celeron which is still crippled by its 66MHz FSB.

There is still a great demand, at least from the OEM/system integrator market, for a cost effective integrated Duron platform. And although the VIA KM133 chipset does provide just that, it has yet to be seen in use and there is still quite a bit of skepticism regarding the reliability and quality of the drivers for the chipset's integrated Savage4 core. SiS' 730S solution is another potential savior for the Duron, however we have yet to see it in action either.