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.