Micron allies with AMD

Micron Electronics Inc. announced an alliance Monday with Advanced Micro

Devices Inc. under which Micron will offer several new desktop PCs containing

AMD processors.

"We believe this is going to be the fastest desktop on the market at

a price advantage," said Robert Meissner, director of product marketing

for Micron. AMD makes the Athlon processor.

In addition, Micron is the first on the market with a faster, cost-conscious

type of memory: Double data rate synchronous DRAM (DDR memory), a new type

of memory that is an offshoot of synchronous DRAM. The advantage of DDR

memory is that the data rate is twice as fast but the price is only marginally

higher than Rambus memory, the de facto standard for memory architectures.

One of Micron's new product offerings is a desktop PC called the Millennia

Max XP, which is targeted at small enterprises and available directly from

micronpc.com. This offering is the first time Micron is using an AMD processor

in a direct channel product.

The Millennia Max XP features an AMD 760 chipset, an AMD Athlon processor

and DDR memory. It ranges in price from $1,500 to $3,000.