Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

AMD Slashing Prices Still Not Enough?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the price-wars-mean-happy-consumers dept.

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."

7 of 159 comments (clear)

  1. gamers beware. by Library+Spoff · · Score: 2, Interesting

    If you're thinking of buying an AMD64 X2 for gaming and intend to put the chip in a motherboard with the Nvidia N4 chipset beware...
    Myself and several others have had problems with both Battlefield 2 and Source games (CS:S, day of defeat etc)

    Very annoying.

    Now i'll get lot's of replies from folks with this setup telling me otherwise....

    --
    Acid House saves Souls
  2. What about Opterons? by pieterh · · Score: 2, Interesting

    AMD have taken a large part of the market that Itanium was meant to take, the 64-bit multicore server market. It's a market that pays for commodity performance above all, and AMD seem to have become the dominant CPU supplier for high-end X86 systems like the HP ProLiant DL585. These are the kinds of server that run Wall Street.

    --
    My blog
    1. Re:What about Opterons? by gnasher719 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      'Uhm, Dell started shipping Opterons in May, precisely because high-end users were demanding them, and buying their servers from HP.'

      That's what I call bad timing. Three months with AMD, that means Intel is pissed off, and now they have the second fastest chips only. And while Apple has record margins because of "extremely favorable component prices", Dell issues a profit warning. Just wondering if these are related.

  3. Re:But its better with most... by maybeHere · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The problem for AMD is that even after slashing the prices, the new Intel Core 2 Duo (Conroe) CPUs still pretty much deliver better bang for the buck (although the Netburst P4 don't, but thank god they're finally about to go the way of the Dodo). AMD's advantage at the moment is mass availability, in that regard things are a bit murky for Conroe. My last few CPUs were all AMD, because for me, they represented the best balance in performance and price. However, I'm planning on building myself a new computer to the end of the year, and at the moment it looks like I'll go for Intel this time, even after those AMD price slashes. Pretty much every single Conroe review has it blowing away the top of the line AMD CPUs... now them Core 2 Duo only need to actually be available *sigh*

  4. Off Topic: AMD PR Numbers by TheRaven64 · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Back in the '90s, Cyrix introduced PR (Pentium Rating) numbers; their chips were slightly better clock-for-clock than Pentia (for integer ops, they weren't so good for floating point) and they marketed them based on the equivalent speed Pentium. When the Pentium II was released, these numbers started looking silly. A 233MHz Pentium II was a lot faster than a PR233 Cyrix part.

    The current crop of AMD parts are marketed with a similar scheme showing the speed of an equivalent Pentium 4. Intel have pretty much discontinued the P4 now, and an Athlon 4200 is definitely not twice the speed of a 2.1 GHz Core 2. Are these performance rating numbers going to make AMD look silly?

    --
    I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  5. Re:Too much is never enough by pla · · Score: 2, Interesting

    My computer is now AMD, the previous was Intel. My next will probably be Intel by the looks of this.

    Agreed - I just thank Zeus that we finally have a good ol' fashioned price war again - Both Intel and AMD have, for a year or two, just kept pushing prices up as though not in competition (which I suppose partially holds true - Intel didn't need to fight for business market share, and AMD didn't need to fight for the DIY'ers).

    However, although Core II Duo (stupid name aside) looks rather impressive, keep in mind that AMD's "4x4" setup might well tip the balance back after only giving Intel a few months on top - Although both AMD and Intel plan to release quad-core chips in 2007, only AMD (as far as we know) has said that their normal desktop version will allow dual CPUs for 8 total cores.

    I do have to wonder how well that will work, though... Dual cores (or dual CPUs) truly kick serious butt for performance. Four CPUs, however, doesn't really add all that much more kick to a machine (for "normal" desktop tasks... For servers, just about every CPU can go to its limit with properly configured software) compared with dual. So unless we see a drastic shift toward massively multithreaded apps in the next year, AMD could look silly trying to kill mosquitos with a sledgehammer.

  6. Marketing by J-1000 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    AMD has done very little, marketing-wise, to strengthen its brand, which makes it very vulnerable to being marginalized when it starts being outperformed by the competition. Intel has their name everywhere and they have the little dun! dun! dun! dun! noise; they've also been a tough competitor even when AMD had the better performing chips. What does AMD have? A dull logo.