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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.
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
Moore's Law predicts that this will happen which is that we will see the doubling of hardware capacity per dollar every 18 months. It looks like Intel has just finally decided to shift down it's prices. I guess the gravy train of overcharging on processers is over for now, until they release another model chip (which is really based on the last one). What will they call this one? Pentium V? Pentium Squared? Pentium Pentium?
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!
Hopefully as price drops and more people purchase the pIV chip the power of the chip will become more and more applicable. At first look the pIV may look like a bomb, a dud, a slow chip. But, the chip has great potential which is yet to be realized. As more and more applications are made available which are optimized for the pIV we'll really start to see this chip shine.
scott
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
From more coverage at ZDNET:
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
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 have bought Athlon the past two times I built a computer.
I hate to say it, but both computers suffer from problems such as lock-ups, random reboots, and other compatability issues, especially when playing directx games. I bought the second board (and chip) because the first one did not work. I even bought the board that TomsHardware recommended as the best athlon board at the time (MSI K7-Master S).
The AMD chip is faster, but my Intelly friends have had NONE of the problems I have had when running the very same programs. Therefore, no matter how much more it costs, or how much slower it goes, I will buy Intel in the future, and recommend that my friends do the same.
It is a real shame, because I think the Athlon is a better chip. I just won't trust Athlon boards anymore. If they made a chip that was compatible with an Intel board, I'd buy it.
WWJD? JWRTFA!
Yet at pricewatch the lowest price listed for the same processor is $395. Does this mean the companies selling them below the list price are selling them at a loss or are they getting an even better deal than this?
Okay, I was curious enough to check Pricewatch (www.pricewatch.com) and found about the same story there as I've found for the last few years.
$395 Pentium 4 2.4GHz
$245 Pentium 4 2.2GHz Sock 478
$195 Pentium 4 2.0GHz Sock 478
$173 Pentium 4 1.9GHz Sock 478
$186 Athlon XP 2100
$146 Athlon XP 2000
$122 Athlon XP 1900
$95 Athlon XP 1800
You can get an AMD 1.53GHz for less than $100 now!!
These price cuts by Intel are long overdue by my reckoning, and while it is a step in the right direction, they've still got a ways to go.
Anyone wanting a CPU upgrade at this point anyway would be wise to wait a bit for the 64-bit CPU price war to begin, it's not far away at all, and then all these chips will look slow and clunky.
Palaces, barricades, threats, meet promises
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)
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.
Many sites have been stating that the next price cut won't be until October. I also found it interesting that Intel is selling some of it's stock in AMD.
http://www.kubuntu.org/
Intel dispatched a suit and an engineer right away
Huh? Do Intel engineers usually go to work naked?
:)
Actually they dont.... if it was advertised like that, then blame the morons at the company you bought it from.... or blame yourself for not knowing what you were buying... how is it false advertising when "XP 1800+" says NOTHING about the clock speed???
::drooll::)... the P4 is over %200 "faster", yet the G4 performs twice as good in bechmarks...
Obviously you don't know much about processors if you think that the 2.2ghz is 50% faster than the 1.5 because of the clock speed... when speed really has nothing to do with that. Take a G4, for example, at 1ghz (which does a gigaflop...
yea, most people don't really think about their heatsink just falling off.... I really don't worry about that when buying a processor....
Your questioning of Intel's math abilities intrigued me, so I looked into the new pricing.
;-)
As clearly stated on the new pricing table here, the P4M 1.5GHz dropped 26%, the P4M 1.7Ghz dropped 53%, and other P4Ms dropped between those two percentages. Clearly they were stating the range of percentages of the price drops.
Since you might indeed be math impared yourself, I will show you how they got the 53%:
(Orig. Price - New Price) / New Price * 100 = % Decrease
($508-$241)/$508*100=53%
I hope this cleared up the issue. I don't know which is worse, one who spouts off without looking at the facts or one who just bashes a company to get karma.
-- Find the Truth...
It would happen literally the *day* after I ordered all the parts for my new computer.
This just ruins the feeling I get from paying significantly less for an Athlon...paying just "substantially less" is far less satisfying.
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"
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
(Orig. Price - New Price) / New Price * 100 = % Decrease
Stating an erroneous equation for calculating percentage does nothing to I hope this cleared up the issue.
Price changes as any other changes is calculated in relation to the original data point, NOT then new.
How would you calculate a 100% price drop by the way?
Do you have one of those original faulty Intel chips.
Math Bug by any chance?
Help fight continental drift.
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?
I run my studio on AMD processors and have never been happier. My XP 1700 machine has bluescreened once in its life. What OS are you running?
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
In other words, you can get an i486-DX2 for $4.24 (a 53% decrease of the previous price of $8)
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
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.
actually amd's latest processor work is to do more in a clockcycle, whereas intel's latest processor work is to deepen the pipelines, and avoid pipeline stalls, so they can boost the clock way up, but the end up doing less per clock.
so in the end, the amd and intel chips are about as different on performance as an amd and a motorolla
Need a Catering Connection
I could never buy intel chips takes a lot longer to type intel then amd in a price seach engine. heh =-P
the point to be made (which no one got) was that in standard applications there are certian ones that are "optimised" for intel chipsets... its almost like when ATI had the driver cheat which gave them better fps on quake3... lots of people thought it was a dirty trick...
P4's consume too much power and generate too much heat. This is the reason why P3's are still used in most rackmount servers. This is why Intel is charging so much for the Tualatin 512KB P3 and so little for the P4 Xeon.
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.
" So while it may run at 1.53GHZ, that is not the name of the processor. I find it annoying that you just can't call the processor by the correct name"
Yeah, and if you run GNU software on that processor you'd better get used to calling it the GNU/AMD XP 1800.
graspee
What MB are you talking about? I am going to be building a (hopefully) quiet, low-power Linux home router soon and that MB sounds very interesting, as long as it has at least 3 PCI slots so that I can get 3 NICs on it ...
Thanks!
Sorry to respond to my own post, but ... I found it:
8 7c lr.html
... sweet!
http://203.161.230.38/product_img/socket_370/m7
Looks like it's right around $75 US on Pricewatch
A quality 200W power supply is better than a lousy 300W power supply. Dell makes a quality 200W power supply. That is, Dell wrote a specification calling for a quality power supply that some company (probably in Asia) meets.
I have 2 machines: A Dell Dimension 4100 w/ PIII and a 200W power supply and two 7200 IDE drives. My other machine is a newly built Athlon box-- I bought quality RAM (Samsung) and a quality 300W PS (Enermax). It also has 2 7200 drives. Guess which one is more stable?? Yep, the Dell.
I view my computer as 4 systems.
1. The processor, ram and motherboard all get replaced at the same time. This one is the expensive one, and the most pertinent to performance, but it is hard to upgrade one without the other 2.
2. Second system is your storage. Your drives and controller. IDE and SCSI are more or less backward compatible, but the newer drives are sooooo much faster, feature less noise, and seem more reliable. Drives make a large amount of the high performance perception. Adding RAM in linux helps cache drives, adding performance. Windows gains less from this addition.
3. The third system is your graphics, audio and network. Im an app developer, and do little 3d. I listen to mp3's, so I touch these components rarely. I buy the consumer level NVidia, and do well with it.
4. The fourth is your case and powersupply. ATX is standard now, but cases wear out, get scratched, I modify them too much. Im on my fourth case in 2 motherboards, so I average about one a year.
Computers have planned obsolesence, make sure you buy at the right point on the price curve, and you come out ahead. I love performance, so I buy dual processors, but I buy a little slower chips. I find that helps prolong computer life without spending too much. I also multitask constantly, for gamers, it is a differant story. Watch pricewatch, read anandtech, save your pennys.
cide1
-- the computer doesn't want any beer, no matter how much you think it does. NEVER, EVER feed your computer beer.
I've used AMD products since my 286 and have never ever had an issue (except the K6/2400 was a poor perfomrer, but compatible). I keep hearing this stuff and I have yet to have a bad experiencewith my KT266 A motherboard nor my Athlon Xp 1700+. I've seen flaky systems, but this thing has been rock solid. And despite all my personal experience and the positive reviews, the name "Intel" still has a tendency to think "reliable". The two things I hear is that motherboard chipsets for Socket A are unreliable and that AMD processors are space heaters, but the latest line doesn't seem to demonstrate either to me... I agree the K6/2 was truly bad with heat, but the XPs seem to be reasonable..
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
As for getting a good frame rate in Quake3, your comment is pretty stupid. Unless you have an ancient graphics card, you surely get a higher frame rate with your Athlon than the refresh frequency of your monitor. I know I like playing at 1600X1200, and I still get better than 85fps, which is all my monitor can display.
If you've fallen for Intel brainwashing, that's your own problem. Just don't go thinking you're insightful when all you do is repeat their FUD without really taking the time to look at real specs.
Those are the "official" prices. Their actual prices are a whole lot lower. Check Pricewatch.
...timed for the launch of the t-bred (AthlonXP on 13-um process).
Intel 2.66GHz and 2.6GHz P-4s are already on pricewatch (alternatively for 400Mhz and 533Mhz FSB). Only $633! Such a deal!
---
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).
60W * 1KW/1000W * 24h * 30days/1Month = 43.2 KWh/Month
43.2 KWh/Month * C$0.08/KWh = $3.456/Month
Nice try.
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.