AMD will sell out Athlon production this quarter, Jerry Sanders told analysts yesterday. This could be taken as a good or bad thing. On one hand, having people clamouring to buy your flagchip ™ product is always nice, but what it actually means is that Chimpzilla simply doesn't have enough production capacity.

And little Duron is also encountering problems of its own, added the CEO, in that it may be part of the steepest ramp of a new product in AMD's history, but its success has been tempered by a lack of integrated chipset support. Production of VIA's new KM133 chipset should begin next month, Sanders said.

A desktop version of AMD's 64-bit Hammer chip, the Clawhammer, is scheduled for release in Q1 2002. Sledgehammer, aimed at four and eight way servers, will ship in Q2. Clawhammer could cost less than current Durons, hinted AMD.

AMD claims even its slowest chips will outperform competing Pentium 4s in most benchmarks, but by 2002, Pentium 4 should be up around 3GHz, so some pretty impressive 1.5GHz AMD parts are obviously under development.

Athlon and Duron morph into Palomino and Morgan next year, both utilising an improved Athlon core. Palomino, with 256KB of on-chip cache, is scheduled for Q2, 2001.

Palomino will also spawn a mobile version and the cheapo Morgan, with a minimal 64KB cache, will ship in Q2. ®