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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
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!
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.
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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?
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
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%.
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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.
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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!"
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?
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.