SNEAKY LITTLE Chimpzilla has been playing the stage magician"s game of distracting the eye of those watching the show. In this case, the show was the Opteron launch. It provided a neat distraction from AMD apparently dropping several of the older Athlon XPs. AMD"s current price list usually makes fairly dull reading month to month. This processor has dropped in price by that percentage and so on. This time round the XP 1700+ and 1800+ are simply missing. The Athlon XPs now start with the 2100+ as the lowest processor in the series.
They aren"t the only ones to disappear. Travel down to the Athlon XP-M Desktop Replacement (DTR) processors for notebooks and there are a couple missing too. The 1500+ and 1600+ are no more. Then there"s the 1400+ and 1500+ Athlon XP-M mainstream notebook processors, they"re gone too. The biggest surprise in this spring culling is that the Duron has survived intact. It seems that rumours of its death have been greatly exaggerated.