AMD Slashing Prices Still Not Enough?

PeterN writes to tell us that after hearing the announcement that AMD was slashing prices on their processors by 47%, TG Daily looked a bit deeper and found that it still might not be enough. From the article: "For AMD's planned price drop for its dual-core processors to enable the company to regain its aggressive price/performance competitive position against Intel as it has promised, the company would have to reduce its existing Athlon 64 X2 and Athlon FX prices by between 38% and 56% for its various models, with cuts averaging about 51%. This estimate is based on a comprehensive price/performance review of Intel's soon-to-be-released Core 2 Extreme and Core 2 Duo processors, along with its existing Pentium D dual-core line, pitted against AMD's FX-62, FX-60, and Athlon 64 X2 processors in Tom's Hardware Guide tests."

Comments

But its better with most...

[Roy van Rijn]

Am I reading the article wrong..? It seems to me AMD is doing a pretty fine job, most lines are black, and only a few processors have a better Intel equivelent.

Anyway, I was looking at a 4800 X2, and it seems its still the best option to buy atm, cheaper then the Intel (?).

Still I think AMD has a group of active followers and Intel-haters, they won't stop buying those chips soon. And only in the very high end systems Intel is much cheaper, but thats not what most people will buy.

Re:But its better with most...

[prisoner-of-enigma]

Besides, even if one design adopted 64-bitness earlier in the process than the other, of what benefit is this? If this is advantageous, it should show up in improved performance on 64-bit benchmarks. Is this the case?

As with all things of this type, it depends on the application and its data set. A straight port of a 32-bit app with a 32-bit data set to a 64-bit environment probably isn't going to gain you much. In fact, performance might even suffer, as 64-bit stuff tends to clog up the L2 cache more than 32-bit stuff since it's "bigger" data. Compiler optimizations might help a few things here and there, but I haven't seen huge gains.

Now, if your app specifically takes advantage of 64-bit stuff, such as the larger number of registers, the ability to natively operate on 64-bit data chunks vice 32-bit chunks, and so forth, you can get quite a few gains. I think I've seen POV-Ray benchmarks showing more than 50% gains in performance, although I can't put my finger on a URL right this second.

But the biggest draw for 64-bitness right now is mainly oriented around those of us who want to run relatively large amounts of RAM. Although most 32-bit OS's seem to work fine with 4GB of RAM, in reality some (notably Windows) require some funky tricks to effectively use more than 1GB. 1GB isn't a lot of RAM anymore (I have 8GB in my home dual-CPU, dual-core Opteron setup because I do lots of 3D rendering). A 64-bit OS makes working with this much RAM a breeze. Even if the performance "increase" were near zero, I'd still go 64-bit simply because all the memory issues inherent in 32-bit OS's disappear. Sure, the per-process limits on 32-bit apps still apply, but you can run lots more processes to get around that if need be.

4%?

[Anonymous Coward]

... the announcement that AMD was slashing prices on their processors by 47% ...

the company would have to reduce its existing Athlon 64 X2 and Athlon FX prices by between 38% and 56% for its various models, with cuts averaging about 51%

OK, so they're saying that AMD missed the mark by 4%? And that this is worthy of writing an entire article about (a very short article by the way. Your welcome for the additional ad revenue :( Sheesh, welcome to journalism in the internet age.

So...This Is Being Spun In A Bad Way???

[Anonymous Coward]

Whenever Intel slashes their prices it is trumpeted as a testament to their deep pockets and what joyous fact that is for everyone.

When AMD slashes prices it's....bad???

Sure it's tinfoil hat material, but I am starting to think this past year Intel didn't do the usual passing around of marketing money but have flooded the Net with cash to generate positive PR.

And to think I use to be sickened by simple things like Intel's bogus marketing compiler generated SPEC scores...

Re:So...This Is Being Spun In A Bad Way???

[TheRaven64]

When Intel slashed the prices of the Pentium 4/D series, there was a lot of negative speculation. It turned out that they were just flushing their inventory before the Core 2 was released, since the Pentia were horribly uncompetitive next to the newer Core series and any left unsold after the release of the Core 2 are likely to remain unsold (or be sold at a loss).

The release of the Core 2 caught AMD in the same way that the Opteron caught Intel; they didn't have a competitive product. Their only option is to compete on price, and they are doing this by slashing prices across their entire rage. The question is whether they cut prices enough to make a difference. This article makes it look like they didn't. That would be a shame, since consumers tend to do better when both companies have products that are relatively evenly matched. The prices of the Opterons remained high because the Xeon wasn't competitive in terms of performance or power usage. If the Core 2 has a similar lead on the K8 then they are likely to remain expensive until the K9 is released.

Re:Uhm... still no word on the AMD buying ATI?

[HaloZero]

Uhm...

hate to break it to ya, bud... but... Methinks you spoke about three minutes too soon...

They are not "PR" numbers, they are model numbers.

[imsabbel]

And certainly that 2.1GHZ conroe is sold as Core II 6600, which means intel is cheating, because its only as fast as an A64 5000.
Do you get the point?
Clockspeed is so yesterday. Just forget it.

Its just a nametag. Live with it.

not the issue for many of us

[caudron]

The real news for many of us about the AMD price cuts is extremely cheap CPU upgrades for our 939 socket systems. I have an AMD 3800+ and 3400+. Both are 939 and both mobos allow me to move up to one of the spiffy new dual core chips. With the new price cuts, I can upgrade my system to a dual core chip--each seperate core faster than my current single core CPU---for the price of a cheap-to-average video card. And there are a lot of AMD 939 users out there.

That's the real news, not AMD missing the pricemark by 4%.

Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/

No reason to buy ANY new processors.

[Lumpy]

I just built a New media center PC for the living room. I am testing the XP based MediaPortal project that is turning out to be far superior to Microsoft's XPMedia Center 2005 and it's running on less than $150.oo in parts. Old Celeron 1.8 and horribly old ATX/AGP motherboard bought together from newegg for less than $50.00.

There is no reason at all to buy a new generation processor outside of extreme gaming or science. Hell I still edit video on a 3 year old 2.8 P4 and it works great.

The processor industry is suffering from stagnation. the new stuff is not fast enough to entice someone to throw away their current PC and buy the new performance stuff. and 64 bit has ZERO attraction to consumers and most people as there is no benefit or erason to switch to the 64 bit processors (unless you rtun linux and are a tinkerer.)

Re:Too much is never enough

[hey!]

When your processors are significantly slower than the opposition's, then no discount can be enough.

Well, I dunno.

That's probably true for the hobbyist market, but I'd guess the vast majority of processors go into machines that are never upgraded; therefore the concerns of the manufacturers are probably paramount.

I have a friend in the auto industry who claims that engineers will sell their soul to save a nickel on a 30K$ automobile. Multiply that out by a lot of cars and it adds up. I imagine that it's the same for the computer manufacturers. They aren't likely to be sweating a few whetstones or Mhz, they just want sufficient performance to position a machine in the segment they want it in, then once there every penny saved adds up. Furthermore, they have product development, tooling and marketing timeframes to look at, so they can't be jumping between vendors around every time somebody happens to pull ahead a little on the high end, except as it might affect consumer perception in their target market segment. I expect the degree they like and trust the vendor counts for something to, so manufacturers who put their bets on AMD may feel like their needs are being taken care of.

Re:Off Topic: AMD PR Numbers

[MtViewGuy]

Here's the thing about AMD's PR numbers for their Athlon CPU's: they are far more representative of true level of CPU performance than the old Cyrix PR numbers. If you note all the tests done by Tom's Hardware and Anandtech with the Athlon XP CPU some years ago, note that the Athlon XP 2400+ CPU running at a much lower CPU clock rate than the Northwood-core Intel Pentium 4 2.4 GHz CPU had almost the exact performance on speed test and real-time application programs. The reason is simple: AMD's CPU core processed CPU instructions far more efficiently per clock cycle than the Pentium 4 CPU at the same clock speed.

It's all a bit of history repeating

[MrShaggy]

See from what I can guess from it all is that I can remember when Intel was forced to drop its prices because of amd, and it was huge like that too. Not that Amd was any better, bu, If I am right, but they were at least half the price. Everybody went AMD, 90% for half the price, sounds good.