AMD's "Frantic Price Cuts" May Pressure Intel

kog777 writes in with news of a Needham analyst report alerting their clients to a possible price war between AMD and Intel. Analyst Y. Edwin Mok notes that AMD has cut its prices three times in three weeks. He says that Dell has been playing off the two chipmakers against one another to drive costs down. He suggests that bargain-hunting clients avoid both AMD and Intel stock for now. As an aside, Mok notes that so far Vista is not causing a spike in demand for chips. This story hasn't been picked up very widely; other coverage is at Seeking Alpha.

Comments

This must be a dell challenge......

[AMindLost]

to see how many suppliers they can drive out of business before they drive themselves out of business.

Re:Fab prices

[bindo]

or they are getting good deals from the 90nm fabs as they drop prices to compete with the 65nm fabs (I believe AMD outsources a lot of their fab work.)

you believe wrong.

Intel, amd and IBM are the three last big behemoths of bleeding edge chip fabrication. And to keep up IBM and AMD signed a deep alliance at the beginning of the decade.

First outsourcing for chips from AMD was last year and it took 5 years and a failed deal to arrange.
Normally in these conditions partners are NOT fungible. As in THERE ARE NO 65nm merchant fabs in the world who can compete with Intel or AMD ...

They are clearing inventory. The point is: what will the price of the new parts be??
In the chip industry this is the way price wars erupt. You make MORE space than necessary in your listings and the new parts start lower than where the older parts started.

Re:Vista

[rbarreira]

I'm happily running Vista on a single core cpu right now, without any performance problems... Care to give any sources on that claim?

LitePC?

[flyingfsck]

I wonder when the Vista version of LitePC http://www.litepc.com/ will be available. Once one can successfully remove DRM and other cruft from Vista at the click of a button, it should become more popular.