Slashdot Mirror
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.
I mean, sure, AMD's chips are dirt cheap, but sometimes I just want to have a chip that I can be sure to depend on over the years. Certainly, the newest offerings from Intel are the coolest running in the competitive gaming market (not like an AMD, which I could probably cook my breakfast over). I'm sick of my room getting all stuffy and hot just from leaving my Athlon machine on for more than 10 minutes, despite the best efforts of the air conditioning unit and the ceiling fan.
Also, I have a DDR SDRAM motherboard for my Athlon, and I've figured that it'd at least work as a stopgap measure until I could afford something better. Fortunately, now that the final price barrier is gone on the alternative, I can finally get some nice Quake III framerates with an RDRAM-based board. That extra memory bandwidth sure is nice.
So, score one for Intel, and score one for my power bill. My wallet will thank me later.
"I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." - George Bush
A university I know is building a 1000-node Beowulf (yeah, I said the B word) and called both Intel and AMD.
;-)
Intel dispatched a suit and an engineer right away, and was very aggressive on price.
They're still waiting for the AMD guy to show up.
I think Intel is trying to push every resource it can to dominate the market, and they had very good results so far.
AMD: Wake Up!
How they arrived at the number 53% is a little bizarre:
Intel cut prices on its Pentium 4 processor for laptop computers by 26 percent to 53 percent
So they just add all the price cuts they've made on the processor together to come up with 53%? What's up with that? It's not like they just dropped it 53%, they dropped it by 26%.
Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon
The odd thing from the price cuts is that a 2.2 MHz P4 Xeon Prestonia, w/ 512KB L2 cache, now costs $32 less than a 1.4GHz PIII Tualatin w/ 512KB L2 cache. Both of these chips are intended (by Intel) for servers/high end workstations.
If you can't beat them, embrace and extend them.
It's that simple. If you do boneheaded things like use cheap, weak 200W power supplies like Dell uses and put one too many drives in the machine (two Seagate Barracuda IV's in the 1GHz Celeron box in this case), you'll have an unstable, flakey system (unplugging the second drive fixed that). If you don't install the current Service Pack, updates, and drivers (like Dell failed to do), you'll get an unstable Windows system (yes, I know, run Linux, but we don't have the source to everything that'd need porting).
If you carried over your 5-year-old ATX power supply to your new Athlon system just because the plug fit and didn't buy an Athlon-certified power supply (the P4's second power plug forced upgrade spared them from that), you'll have a flakey system. If you bought a VIA chipset board (ASUS's A7V333 is great, just so y'know) and didn't install the current 4in1 driver set, you'll risk a flakey system. If you bought an Intel board because you don't like VIA and didn't check out the nVidia nForce boards (which are driving AMD's invasion of the big OEM market), you're an idiot.
Building Athlons requires slightly more skill than building an Intel-based system. If you can't handle it, go buy a prebuilt system from someone who can.
That's significant. Intel's "processor of the future" is only made in the old fab. That's a strong indication that the Itanium is moving to the back burner.
The next generation Itanium is supposed to launch at 1GHz this summer. Meanwhile, Intel has demoed a 5GHz Pentium 4, although that's a year or two from production.