In a financial analysts conference call AMD Chairman Jerry Sanders announced the phasing out its value Duron processor line by the end of the year in favor of the Athlon for all price ranges.

Sanders believes that due to the "cost advantage of copper and 0.13-micron (processing) will enable Athlon to be competitive in price and performance in all markets", meaning that the Duron will be pointless.

Sanders also stated that when Duron production ends the Fab 25 plant in Austin, Texas will become a 100% flash memory facility. This leaves processors being fabricated at AMD’s Fab 30 plant in Dresden and at UMC’s foundry in Taiwan only.

Later in the conference call AMD President Hector Ruiz stated that all Athlon processor production will be out-sourced to UMC, with Dresden being dedicated to Hammer production. However, while the PC Claw Hammer, and high-end Sledge Hammer processors production are being ramped up Athlon production will remain for the next few years. Ruiz stating that "there will still be a good market for Athlon" for some time to come

However, before the Duron is culled later this year, there will be a new core introduced – the 0.13 Appaloosa, the desktop equivalent of the Mobile Athlon XP (just with less L2 cache presumably). Sanders didn't comment on the Duron Appaloosa but pointed out that all 0.13-micron processors are the same die size and produced in Dresden.

In announcing their Q1 financial results Sanders also revealed that AMD market share against Intel had stayed the same, with a record 8 million processors being shipped in the quarter – compared to 41 million in the industry, resulting in a 19.5% market share. Sanders asserted that the only reason why this didn’t increase was due to the fact that Dell, an “exclusively Intel house” was the only PC company to have major growth in the marker. Since they expect the same next quarter, AMD are not predicting any growth in market share this quarter either. In addition AMD reported processor revenue in the first quarter of $684 million, down from $703 million the previous period but up slightly from the same quarter a year ago.

Hmm....pretty interesting.....Didn't Intel just announce a new line of "Pentium 4" Celeron's??

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