AMD Unleashes Sempron CPU

AMD's new CPU is a shot across the bow of Intel, which last month introduced its own value desktop processors in the form of the Celeron D family.

"We believe we'll be well-positioned with Sempron to go head-to-head against Celeron," says Kurt Holman, AMD's marketing manager for desktop microprocessors.

Indeed, the unit prices announced this morning by AMD for the Semprons generally hover between $4 and $8 less than those for Intel's recently unveiled Celeron Ds.

While such price differentials seem small, AMD believes the Sempron will enable resellers to squeeze a little bit of additional profit out of sub-$500 boxes.

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"Margins in that space are fairly thin, but I think with Sempron we're better positioned to offer a value proposition," Holman says.

Equally important, Sempron fills a couple of gaps in AMD's processor lineup. Its faster clock speed and bigger cache enables it to replace the obsolescent, low-end Duron CPU.

But Sempron is a powerful enough processor to allow AMD to plan to get rid of its Athlon XP. That will enable the company to stanch any burgeoning Athlon brand confusion. The blurring is being caused by Athlon XP's presence as a 32-bit-only part, sitting alongside the more popular Athlon 64 processors. The latter are 32/64-bit hybrid CPUs, which contain 64-bit instruction-set extensions and are compatible with Microsoft's soon-to-be-released 64-bit desktop version of Windows.

"We'll start transitioning the Athlon XP, which was announced in October 2001, out of the marketplace during the first half 2005," Holman explains. "What we're doing is coming to a clear, differentiated, two-brand strategy with Sempron in the value space, and Athlon 64, which has been out since September of last year, occupying the mainstream [desktop] space in the market."

As the first leg of that plan, AMD will work hard to carve out a deep slice of the value space. For the domestic market, the lowest end Sempron will typically be the 1.67-GHz model 2400+, which is priced at $61 in 1,000-unit quantities. But AMD is unleashing its 1.5-GHz Sempron 2200+ in Asia for $39.

That CPU will appear immediately in systems released today by Lenovo Group of China, intended for sale in the domestic Chinese market.

In the United States, AMD says a wide variety of Sempron-based systems will be unveiled by OEMs -- Hewlett-Packard among them -- in the next four to six weeks. Sempron notebooks are expected in the third quarter from Acer and Sharp.

For white-box VARs, the more pertinent news may be the imminent availability of Sempron motherboards from vendors Soyo, Asus, Biostar, Elitegroup, Shuttle, Tyan and MSI, among others.

The motherboard flood is being spurred by AMD's technical decision to fit the Sempron into the company's existing Socket-A technology. That will enable motherboard vendors to quickly refit some existing platforms for the new processor.

"A lot of the existing Socket-A motherboards can be leveraged with just a BIOS update," Holman explains.