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Pentium IV As A Budget Processor
nutbar writes: "Intel, seeing a slow uptake of its latest processor, the Pentium 4, are going to slash prices by as much as 50% this month. Full full story at ZDNet." The article mentions the goal of P4 systems, including monitors, for under a thousand dollars by the end of the year. Will these price cuts invert the price / performance ratio which has led people to scoff at the P4 in favor of AMD chips? Maybe it's best to wait for odd-numbered chip generations ... Pentium Pentium?
Intel increased their pipeline length so that they could more easily ramp frequency. That's fine -- that's an engineering tradeoff. However, it is only a good tradeoff if it allows them to ramp the frequency enough to overcome the performance lost to branch misprediction. However, current top of the line Pentium IV's are beaten by PIII's and Athlons, so obviously this didn't happen. It was not the correct time to make this change in architecture.
The Pentium IV was ill-conceived and rushed to market. Pentium IV is Intel's half-baked, panicked reaction to AMD's continued dominance in benchmarks. Intel was banking that they could market it enough to sell the thing, but it isn't working. The price is too high, and the performance is too low. The market just isn't biting, and with damn good reason.
And I'm really sick of hearing Intel apologists whine that current software is written for Pentium II/III's. AMD has never had software written towards their platform, but they are still winning in benchmarks. There are optimizations that people could do for Athlon that would make it look even better in the benchmarks. AMD has always dealt with running apps optimized for competitor's chips. So I don't exactly have sympathy for poor old Intel that broke their own optimizations with this generation.
You mean AMD is not playing Intel's game. Intel's decision was a bad one. Lengthening the pipe will be required eventually to ramp clock speed, but you don't release non-competitive processor and say "we know it sucks, but future products will be better, so buy this one now". What do consumers care about the design? They just want the performance ramp, and maintaining that ramp is effectively AMD and Intel's mission in life. Intel failed in their mission.
Intel shouldn't have fielded a chip in this new line until it was competitive. They released too early because they were scared. It wasn't a good engineering decision.
--Lenny
I'm just waiting for Intel to abandon the Pentium line altogether and move on to the Sexium. They have a great slogan ready-made for them: "The Intel Sexium processor--Turn it on."
Then later they can introduce the Septium and, for a greatly reduced price, lower quality versions called 'Deviated Septiums'.
Unfortunately, even if they gave away P4's for free, a P4 system will not be a budget system, at least not until it supports SDRAM.
1) Motherboards for P4 are almost $100 more expensive than for P3's or Athlons. The cheapest P4 motherboard on Pricewatch is $175. This will go down somewhat as volumes get better, but not much. A P4 motherboard has two strikes against it: It's hard to lay out because it has to support the 400MHz Rambus clocks (dual channel, even), and because the Intel chipset that supports the P4 is more expensive than the Via chipsets you can get for P3 or Athlon
2) RAM is way more expensive. You need 2 sticks of RDRAM. A single 64Meg stick of rdram costs $60 ($120 for 2). You can get 128Meg of PC133 for $30. I put 256MB in the last budget PC I put together, so that makes things even worse.
3) You need a special case. Add a few more dollars.
4) You need a good power supply. Well, so does the Athlon. A 1.333GHz Athlon and a 1.5GHz P4 both have about the same max power (73Watts). (comparing apples to apples). But the P3 and the Via C3 (now that's a budget processor) both can get by with cheap power supplies.
In total, you have to add about $200 to the price of that P4. You can get a high end Athlon for about $200. Kind of makes it hard for Intel to compete, doesn't it?
Bryan
There are several problems with this:
1) As the article stated, AMD has to price the Athlon frequency for frequency. They are going to have to price the 1.3 GHz Athlon below the 1.3 GHz Pentium, not the 1.5 GHz Pentium 4. 99% of consumers look at frequency for performance, not some other benchmark. This is good for Intel, and bad for AMD; AMD has higher performance per frequency, but they don't know how to market this. Unless AMD educates consumers, gigahertz will continue to be the benchmark. IMHO, they cannot change this since they don't have the credibilty of Intel.
2) The Intel brand is one of the most valuable brands in the world, while AMD is comparatively unheard of. The Pentium 4 itself is a very good brand, because of the marketing campaign. So, the P4 has an automatic price premium above Athlon. Thus AMD has to undercut the P4 price, or they won't sell any (except to zealous AMDroids who are willing to pay a premium for Athlons - and this is a miniscule percentage of the market).
I think this is good for Intel; but it probably hurts AMD a lot more than it helps Intel. This will continue to put enormous price pressure on their ASP, which they cannot afford to lose (they have lots of debt and little cash, while Intel has something like $15 billion in cash and almost no debt).