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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."
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....
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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.
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I'm surprised there's nothing regarding that deal on Slashdot yet, as it appears to be as good as done.
... the announcement that AMD was slashing prices on their processors by 47% ...
:( Sheesh, welcome to journalism in the internet age.
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
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.
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For example, the 4200+ model would have to be priced below $213, but is indicated to sell for $225.
I'd buy one if it was $213, but $225 is just too damn expensive!
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After the cuts
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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?
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Have you checked Core 2 Duo compatible motherboard prices?
They are around 200 euros. You can get a pretty good NForce4 board for 939 X2 for under 100 euros, and even AM2 boards are in 100-140 euro range.
So total price, board+cpu, AMD still wins by a clear margin (price/performance), because intel chipsets are as overpriced as ever...
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.
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HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
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
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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.
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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 $50.00.
There is no reason at all to buy a new generation processor outside of extreme gaming or science. Hell I still edit video on a 3 year old 2.8 P4 and it works great.
The processor industry is suffering from stagnation. the new stuff is not fast enough to entice someone to throw away their current PC and buy the new performance stuff. and 64 bit has ZERO attraction to consumers and most people as there is no benefit or erason to switch to the 64 bit processors (unless you rtun linux and are a tinkerer.)
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When your processors are significantly slower than the opposition's, then no discount can be enough.
Well, I dunno.
That's probably true for the hobbyist market, but I'd guess the vast majority of processors go into machines that are never upgraded; therefore the concerns of the manufacturers are probably paramount.
I have a friend in the auto industry who claims that engineers will sell their soul to save a nickel on a 30K$ 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.
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The first has been mentioned, the most recent Dual Core Processor Driver from AMD's web site.
The second (if that does not work) is to explicitly bind your game to a single core. Start the game and right away hit control-alt-delete. Select the game in the "processes" tab, right-click and select "set affinity" and check only 1 processor.
I too have an x2, nVidia video card and nVidia chipset. I had problems with Everquest2 until I installed the first, and regular Everquest until I did the second (every time you play). My wife has never had a problem with WoW.
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.
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.
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them.
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.