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Intel Cuts Chip Prices by up to 53 Percent
babbage1815 writes: "Intel Corp. has cut prices on some of its microprocessors by as much as 53 percent as the world's largest chipmaker's investments in manufacturing over the past two years are starting to pay off." Most of the cuts are at the very high end of the line -- it'll be interesting to see what happens to the prices of the competing AMD offerings.
Will software companies ever get to do this, they seem to be always charging more for their work... and it's cheaper to copy a CD than to copy a processor...
Then again, that's a two way blade, it's easier for people to pirate their software than to pirate their chips...
...you win!
Palaces, barricades, threats, meet promises
Aren't Intel's prices almost twice as much as AMD's already for mostly equivalent processors? I take this to mean that Intel has decided that AMD is now a veritable threat and as such is no longer pricing like they are the only option. This will take a chunk out of AMD's sales for sure (even if they make similar price cuts) but I suspect that its main purpose will be that knowledgable comsumers will now consider Intel a viable option again.
I stole this Sig
I'd love to upgrade my CPU, but I've got one of these Slot A things that Intel abandoned so many years ago.
... think I'll just stick with my Celeron 366, it functions well enough...
So really, to upgrade my CPU, I need to get a new motherboard. To get a new motherboard, I probably need to get a new case & power supply, maybe some new RAM... and hell, at that point I might as well get a new computer and plug in some of my old peripherals.
Either way I'm out $500-1000
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
The article says that Intel is attributing the price cuts to higher yields, which in turn are due to large investments in its foundries. I'm a little puzzled by this, since this is suggesting that mass-market chip cost actually has something to do with supply, whereas I'd generally assumed that most chip prices were determined by some combination of development cost and demand (i.e., you'll have enough chips; just charge as much as the market will bear and if development is expensive enough you won't have enough competition to bring the price down). The latter is almost certainly true for many server chips. How much is the price of high end mass-market chips actually determined by supply limitations these days?
I mean, hey, everytime I turn around, more and more of these powerful devices are costing less and less! I have now seen this happen first hand throughout the majority of my life, from my awesome 1.023mhz 8 bit 48KB ram/16 KB rom IIe, to nowadays rackable machines far more powerful than the fastest dedicated-room supercomputer's of just 15 years ago. And if you wait...the technology will just get better!!! YEAH!
:)
What happened to all the other high performance processors? MIPS, SPARC, PA-RISC? They are/were all attached to high-performance UNIX workstations.
And what happened to those high-performance boxes? Ask the IT dude who's firing up his handbuilt Dual Athlon running Red Hat 7.2.
It's bad enough that the decrepit x86 architecture has lasted this long. With only Intel around, they will extend its lifetime indefinitately, filling our lives with overheating chips that run at twice the Mhz with half the performance...
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
I don't understand why they called the chip makers -- wouldn't it be more appropriate to call a systems vendor? It's not like you take a bunch of CPUs, put them in a pile, and have Beowulf cluster.
Um, yeah, the P4 is labeled with its true clock speed, but guess what? If you take an AMD 1.53GHZ and match it up with a P4 1.5, the AMD will outperform it in every single category, except possibly some programs optimized for SSE2 instructions.
The (*still* less expensive, even with the latest Intel price cuts) AMD 1800+ is more suited to compete with Pentiums quite a bit faster than itself, starting at about 1.8GHz.
Clock speed doesn't mean anything as compared to just other manufacturers' clock speeds. Are you going to tell me that your P4 2.4 is faster than the fastest Alpha or Sparc processor, just because the clock speed is higher??
The architecture is completely different in each case, and can't be compared so simplistically.
Palaces, barricades, threats, meet promises
That does absolutely nothing to improve the performance of older apps that you might have...apps for which you might well have forked over a considerable amount of money. Maybe it wouldn't have been so bad if, in those early benchmarks, the P4 had been able to at least keep up with the P!!!, let alone the Athlon. In particular, I recall how people ragged on the K6-series processors for their FPU performance. I wonder why similar noise hasn't been made regarding the P4's subpar x87 FPU performance.
Cheaper prices are all good, but I still don't see any reason to switch away from AMD.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Bullshit. AMD has been more than forthcoming with its view that "megahertz über alles" is a Bad Idea. 1800 isn't the speed at which the processor runs. It's a performance metric that happens (for the time being) to track rather closely with what a P4 at X MHz will deliver, but the processor can deliver that performance at a slower clockspeed. Get a clue before you post next time, go back under your bridge, and consider yourself LARTed.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
The main question that I would have is.. How long will it take for the distributors to sell their stock of "expensive" chips befores cutting there prices too and as a consequence how long will it take for those price reductions to reach us? And it is much shorter for companies like Dell?
Anyone in the industry would know?
So earlier today I went to look for what I would need to upgrade my system. I need CPU, RAM and a motherboard. AMD is supposed to be the price / performance king right? Comparing an Athlon 1600+ vs a P4 1.6 with roughly compareable (feature wise) MSI motherboards and 256 MB RAM I will save 55 Canadian dollars, about 30 US, with the AMD system. Before this price cut.
So, WTF? For fifty bucks I'll buy the Intel thank you. I'll probably have that in the first 3 month's power bills anyway.
What? GeForce 4's got some feature that has to be _utilized_? Man, Nvidia sucks...
What? There's a new fancy-ass features in 386? What? Altivec? What? T&L?
Progress needs change.
Fortune says:
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Imagine that Cray computer decides to make a personal computer. It has a 150 MHz processor, 200 megabytes of RAM, 1500 megabytes of disk storage, a screen resolution of 4096 x 4096 pixels, relies entirely on voice recognition for input, fits in your shirt pocket and costs $300. What's the first question that the computer community asks?
"Is it PC compatible?"
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It's because of people like you that we are stuck in x86 in the very first place.
Manufacturing costs are falling, of course, as is the need to recoup development costs, but this has little to do with Intel's prices. It charges whatever it thinks the market will bear (as does AMD).