American Micro Devices (AMD) has recently announced that they have
been sold out of all of their CPUs, the K6-2, K6-III, and AMD Athlon
Processors for the second fiscal quarter of the year 2000.  This announcement
comes on the heels of the recent winning finish in the race for
1GHz.  Anyone that has been in a basic business class, or has
enough common sense to speak, knows what this means:  Higher
Prices until second quarter.  Of course, what was T&T be
without a little twist?  Higher prices is not the case.  AMD
is sold out of processors, but the retailers and OEMs that sell the
CPUs to private people, like you, me, and Joe-Blow, are still in full
supply, especially with the K6 series of CPUs.  For all of the frugal
people, keep your chin up!  Prices are only to fall.

While speaking of AMD, I must mention
their new announcement.  It seems that AMD has been pregnant for
some time, and is soon to give birth to twins.  Being AMD is a
chip maker, and not a human, it’s carrying CPU babies, not human
babies.  These new babies are the AMD Duron, and the successor of
the Athlon, who’s name is yet to be announced.  Both CPUs will
have on-die L2 cache to be full speed, as with the Celeron and Piii
CPUs from Intel, but, also like Intel.  The Duron, if you can’t
guess, will go into the Value PC Market to compete head to head with
the Celeron.18 Processor.  If y’all can do the math, the Duron
will more than likely knock the pants off of the Celeron.  Here’s
why:  The Duron will have more L1 Cache, run on the 100Mhz DDR
(200Mhz) Front-side bus, not the 66Mhz front side bus like the
Celeron.18.  It is also rumored to have more L2 Cache than the
Celeron (256KB vs 128KB) and is also rumored to have a cache latency
of “0″ and not “2″ as with the Celeron.  The
Duron will also have the same Number Crunching core of the Athlon,
which beats the core of the Piii/Celeron.18.  With that said, lay
off your new CPU and Motherboard purchases until the Duron takes hold.

Intel sold out… (one of the the
bad ways)
With AMD releasing two new processors, and possibly even a hidden
third for the server market, no real big news has come from Intel
besides that of the Wilmette, which will be the first basically new
CPU core to come from Intel since the Pentium Pro of 1996.  The
Wilmette is rumored to be introduced in 1.3GHz versions, which leaves
a large gap for the Intel Pentium iii to fill (300MHz).  It will
be very interesting to see what happens in the next 6 months in the
computer industry.  Keep watching PC Mechanic for more technical
news on these Processors.