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...

[MrFlibbs]

Your statement about AMD processors being "designed from scratch for the 64bit computing" is neither accurate nor meaningful. Internally, both AMD and Intel CPUs have used 64bit busses for a long time. (In fact, Intel just went to a 128-bit wide bus to the SIMD units to speed up SSE/2/3 instructions.) I have no idea at what point in their CPU design AMD decided to implement 64-bit registers and instructions, but I'm sure the CPU in which they debuted was based on an existing 32-bit design. Widening registers & ALUs and adding new instructions is non-trivial but pretty straightforward.

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?

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

[maybeHere]

I'm surprised there's nothing regarding that deal on Slashdot yet, as it appears to be as good as done.

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

[dnoyeb]

There is no good reason for AMD to buy ATI. So I would not expect that deal to be "as good as done."

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.

Re:gamers beware.

[thegamerformelyknown]

I play CS:S with no problems at all, and I have a Nf4 and a AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+. However, I did have problems playing CS 1.6 online, the game would go too fast, then lag to "catch up". To fix this, I simply had to install the AMD drivers and all my problems were solved :) So have you installed the CPU drivers?

Yeah.

[Poromenos1]

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!

Before and after

[stupid_is]

Before the cuts

After the cuts

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?

AMD CPU prices are not the whole story

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

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.

Re:gamers beware.

[ozbird]

This sounds like the fix:

AMD Dual-Core Optimizer - The AMD Dual-Core Optimizer can help improve some PC gaming video performance by compensating for those applications that bypass the Windows API for timing by directly using the RDTSC (Read Time Stamp Counter) instruction. Applications that rely on RDTSC do not benefit from the logic in the operating system to properly account for the affect of power management mechanisms on the rate at which a processor core's Time Stamp Counter (TSC) is incremented. The AMD Dual-Core Optimizer helps to correct the resulting video performance effects or other incorrect timing effects that these applications may experience on dual-core or multiple processor systems.

Disabling Cool 'n' Quiet and/or power management may also work.
(I've got an Athlon64 3500+; without CNQ it runs cooler and quieter than the Athlon XP it replaced, so I leave it turned off.)

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/