The Register speculeert over mogelijke tekorten aan AMD Duron processors. Als reden wordt gegeven dat de AMD Duron een heel ander design is dan zijn grote broer de Athlon Thunderbird waardoor slecht gebakken T-Birds dus niet meer als Duron verkocht kunnen worden. Intel past dit truukje al wel een tijdje toe omdat een brakke Pentium III meestal nog als Celeron omgedoopt kan worden.
Intel runs half a dozen 0.18 micron fabs. It churns out Coppermine chips like there's no tomorrow [So how come there's always a shortage of them then? - Ed]. The ones that make the grade get boxed up as 1GHz Pentium IIIs, the slightly iffy ones become 750MHz parts, and the ones that come out with half their L2 cache knackered get to be badged Celerons.
The bottom line for Chipzilla is that it hardly ever has to throw anything away - effectively it only builds one CPU so almost every chip it etches can be used for something or other.
AMD has - at best - a third the number of fabs that Intel can boast, and yet it has two completely different 0.18 processor products. A dodgy Thunderbird can't be recycled as a Duron because it's twice the die size for a start.
Sure you can get more Durons on a wafer, so there's some economy there, but manufacturing two different product lines while having far less capacity than the opposition seems to be asking for trouble.