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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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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).