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

Off Topic: AMD PR Numbers

[TheRaven64]

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?