Intel is set to introduce its 400MHz Willamette-128K Celerons any week now and we"re told by the motherboard manufacturers that will give it a big performance boost.
But can AMD catch up right at the very low end with its Duron processor?
According to the same sources in Old Taipei, AMD is saying that it plans to introduce a 266MHz front side bus for its Duron chips.
But if those sources are correct, it may not launch such souped up Durons for several months yet, suggesting to us there"s a bit of a problem with converting the cut down chip to the higher system bus speed.
The low end of the X86 market hasn"t attracted much attention during this year, and we wonder if Intel intends to push it very hard again, given the kind of clock speeds it will churn out over the next few months.
While Intel"s i845GL is not as crippled as it was, we think that the bulk of the sales Intel wants is with the Pentium 4.
That"s despite the fact that Intel"s president, Paul Otellini, said that the firm couldn"t manufacture as many Celerons during Q1 as it would have liked to – with the main target being the Asian market