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AMD Cuts X2 Processor Prices
BDPrime writes "AMD is cutting prices for its X2 processors, according to an update on its microprocessor pricing list. The cuts refer to AMD's Athlon 64 FX and Athlon 64 X2 chips. Some of the price cuts are almost in half."
Most of the remaining chips on AMD's price list use the Socket AM2 or Socket F form factor, rather than the older Socket 939 interfaces.
I just bought a 4200+ x2 for $159 from newegg. They sold out hours later. I don't think they even make 'em any more. Anything higher than a 4200 was plain sold out everywhere.
So if you've got a socket 939, I'd say you better upgrade with a quickness cuz those CPUs are going, going, gone.
I`m quite surprised by how long it took for this to come into affect after the Core Duo's were released. It seems like they gained immediate acceptance (Core2 Duo) and were getting great reviews from just about anybody, you'd think AMD would drop prices earlier on, I didn't think it would take this long.. I don't think this it was a question of IF... but WHEN.
The magical number is: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Check wherever you bought it from and see if they have one of those "if you find it cheaper in 30 days, we'll refund the difference (especially if it's found cheaper at our same store)" things. A lot of places have them even if they don't advertise it, so it's worth asking.
You should be glad you can deal with Frys and don't have to goto Best Buy and put up with the "Geek squad".
The price cut is in a little less than 2 weeks(April 22nd). Shamelessly ripped from AnandTech:
Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6800 2.93GHz x 2 4MB x 2 $1199
Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 2.66GHz x 2 4MB x 2 $999
Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 2.93GHz 4MB $999
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.40GHz x 2 4MB x 2 $530
Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 2.66GHz 4MB $316
Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 2.40GHz 4MB $224
Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 2.13GHz 2MB $183
Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 1.86GHz 2MB $163
Intel Core 2 Duo E4300 1.80GHz 2MB $113
If you're complaining about ONLY $80 for 1GB of RAM, you have no concept of what non-shitty memory for real workstations can cost."
Hey, I paid more than that for 64k of ram (not 640k .. 64k). $100.00 on sale. A gig of ram for $80 - stop complaining, its cheaper than staples, thumbtacks, plant seeds, etc.
And you should have seen the cost of the abacus before that!!!
I'll bite. 1 GB PC 5300 is $54.99 shipped.
That's no surprise. We have known for some time that Intel is planning to release a few new processors and slash CPU prices dramatically in about two weeks. AMD won't have anything new to show off until later this summer so all they can do is cut their own prices farther and sooner just to keep up.
It was because I just bought a new Athlon X2 cpu last week.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Memory failure is memory failure, period. The application you're running doesn't change the fact that it's not working, it just accentuates it.
If you can't run memtest86 overnight on new RAM, you should return it. End of story.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
AMD chips go 30% faster when 64-bit.
Intel chips go 5% slower when 64-bit.
I suppose this is an indication that Intel marketing pays attention to the very lame old 32-bit benchmarks that are getting used.
64-bit is here now, even if you run Windows. Linux people have had pure 64-bit systems for many years.
The fact that we're stuck with x86 isn't Intel's fault. At the time, CISC was considered a good idea, and as for endianness.... I won't even go there.
Intel has tried to move away from x86: look at the Itanium and Itanium II. Intel gambled that they could find enough ILP with their compiler, and lost, but at least they moved off of x86, right?
The fact is, because x86 was so wildly successful, and because so much software was written for it, Intel had to ensure that future processors were compatible with the x86 instruction set. Doing otherwise would have been deliberately alienating a large part of their market share. It could be argued that x86 compatibility (or lack thereof, more specifically) is one of the major reasons why IA-64 was unsuccessful. Completely moving off of x86 would be devastating to the company, and irresponsible in the eyes of their shareholders/employees.
I can't believe that any engineer in his right mind would actually want to stick with IA-32 in the face of its glaring defects, they're very bright people, and if you need proof of that, just look at the Core. But if you want to sell consumer chips, you don't have any other choice.
I just bought one, too: AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+. I can't say I'm too upset about missing a price drop. These things happen.
What's really cool about these chips, IMO, is that you can get the power-efficient ones that only draw 65 W max for the CPU. My new system only draws 133 W (monitor included) with both CPUs running full blast, and when they're idle and the monitor is powered down, it goes down to only 51 W! These chips have AMD's cool'n'quiet, which is fully supported in recent linux kernels.
This was my first time running a dual-core system. So far I really haven't seen any improvement in performance from the dual core. The sad truth is that most of the time when I end up waiting for my computer to do something, it's either (a) doing I/O, (b) doing something CPU-intensive that's not parallelizable, or (c) it's limited by the speed of the memory, not the speed of the CPU.
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So, where's that Free Software Intel wireless chipset driver, then? (Just sayin'...)
Also, although I agree with you about old ATI's shitty attitude, it seems a little premature to condemn AMD for it. They haven't been the same company for that long yet, you know, and it remains to be seen whether AMD's leadership might change things.
(Note: I'm not an AMD fanboy; in fact I'm posting this from a Core Duo laptop.)
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
You're comparing apples and oranges, and, not only that, but comparing two different types of apple with a single type of orange. Or something like that, whatever the correct metaphor should be.
AMD and ATI have only just merged, so it's a little early to judge the "open-source friendliness" of the new company. However, the history is varied. AMD provides very strong support for gcc and other projects that are important to it, funding a number of full-time developers. ATI hasn't provided as much support for its graphics chipsets - partial documentation rather than active development - but the open-source drivers for ATI still do more than those for Intel, just because Intel graphics chips are a whole lot simpler. (Which means that Intel aren't losing any trade secrets by exposing their internals - their graphics chips are using less "clever stuff" than ATI or nVidia). Every ATI chip that has capabilities in the same class as any Intel graphics chip you care to name has a complete open-source driver, and for every closed ATI GPU there's an equally closed Intel wireless chipset.
Both companies play nice where it suits them and take their ball and go home where that is percieved as the more profitable option. My advice to you is to do the same and pick whichever option gives you more performance per dollar.
What would Lemmy do?
So, where's that Free Software Intel wireless chipset driver, then? (Just sayin'...)
That would be right here. Everything non-binary is licensed under either GPLv2 or dual-license BSD/GPLv2, according to the documentation. The binaries are released in that form because they are prohibited by FCC regulations from releasing anything that could be modified by the end user to violate regulatory limits. Exactly the same thing applies to the MADWifi drivers for Atheros, who makes available a binary HAL to the developers.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
I think they have. Although there have been fines imposed for fixing prices in the past that the memory companies needed to recuperate as well as supplies being limited because of DDR2 and 3 becoming more available.
There are several factors at work here but 5 years ago, 512 megs was going in the $100+ range. Now a full gig is under that in some cases. A key difference between the two might be the amount of competition that is limited by the CPU designs and motherboards that support them when dealing with memory. The memory is more of a reactionary process were they make something then wait for it to be used and the processors generally dictate what types of memory is to be used. You cannot have the same level of competition as you would with processors because of the dependence of usages. On the other hand, Taping into newer processes in production that would make them cheaper seems more reasonable for newer styles of memory when considering the retooling effort needed. Why spend million rebuilding the production system for a third generation technology when you can tool for DDR2 or DDR3 that will have a longer life span.
There are probably more factors involved. I think these are some that seem to pop out and could be likely to influence the price a bit.
And what of chip companies that do publish specs? There are MANY chips from FreeScale (formerly Motorola's semiconductor division) that include fantastic levels of documentation. All the calls, all the functions, all the features. There are bugger all drivers in any Open Source *nix (xBSD, Linux, Plan9, you name it) for the S1 encryption chip. You want to talk about supporting those vendors who support Open Source? Then support them by adding that support.
Let us get down to basics, here. Part of the reason why companies like ATI can avoid supporting Open Source is because the Open Source community has, itself, failed to support the Open Source community. We have not been perfect, shining examples of our own standards and have no right to expect others to adhere to ideals we ourselves fall desperately short of.
Sure, the Open Source community lacks the kind of funding needed for this sort of stuff. So does AMD, whose profits were almost a billion short of expectation, whose net worth is now not much more than ATI prior to being bought, and whose future (due to Intel's near-monopolistic control over the industry and near-inexhaustible supply of funds) is severely in doubt. AMD has less than a tenth of the money of Intel and can't afford the current price-war for much longer. In the meantime, Intel can not only afford it but can afford to make next-gen components that have exactly the same flaws in concept as all their products have always have. Intel can afford it, Intel will essentially kill AMD, and Intel will only correct the flaws in the logic the next time it is threatened by a chip company.
(I may sound a little harsh on Intel there, but it's basically true of all corporations. Quality for the sake of quality is not a concept most managers comprehend, and "engineering excellence" is an oxymoron in any group outside of a few fringe development projects and maybe a couple of Formula 1 teams.)
If support for Open Source were a criteria, I'd say support nobody and move to another planet. As the old NASA joke goes, there is intelligent life on Earth but it's only visiting. There isn't any meaningful support for Open Source, outside of a handful of individuals.
What about IBM? All those 500+ patents they freed up! Yeah, and how many projects do you see based on them? None? Is that a surprise, when most were hardware patents? Outside of OpenCores, I really don't see many people being able to do much with pipeline optimization or CPU scheduling, and frankly most coders there working on CPUs have been doing just fine using their own methods of solving these problems, and anyone likely to want a high-end 64-bit Open Source chip would probably be looking at the Open Sourced UltraSparc. IBM have released lots of bits of project in the past, but never really maintained them and never really did anything with them. You been using IBM's GUI-based Apache management tool? Ever realized IBM had one?
The community should, by rights, support anything and anyone it can, AMD included, because a monoculture would be far far worse than the putrid stench we have at the moment. The existing mess can be fixed, with a lot of time and a lot of patience. Monocultures are stagnant cultures are cultures waiting to die. What we have right now is no great shakes, but I'll take it over a living death any day. The dead can't be cured - well, unless they're a kipper.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I remember during the Pentium IV days all the AMD fans were constantly talking about how AMD owned the price to performance crown and that Intel was overpriced, ran hot (energy inefficient), and was just all around not as good an architecture. They were right - and I bought an Athlon 64 instead of a P4.
Now those same people are trying to argue that the less expensive, cooler and more efficient Core2Duo are still not as good as their beloved AMD. They will point to 64 bit performance or performance over 4GB of ram - or a myraid of little things that are not relevant to the vast majority for at least the next couple years to support their bias.
The processor wars, just like the video wars, will go back and forth. Nobody stays on top forever. Intel, after many years trailing, had their leap ahead for a generation or two. The people who are the most rational go with the best architecture or company at the time. I bought an ATI 9600 instead of a Nvidia 5600, even though I had always owned Nvidia and loved the drivers, because it was the better value for the money at that time.
The bigger person, the more rational person, is the one who can be objective about these things. Which CPU company you "love" is a very strange thing to have an irrational passion about...
Not only that, but the entire 6000 series will be upgraded to 4MBs of cache.
Also shamelessly ripped from AnanadTech: Currently the E6300 and E6400 both have 2MB L2s, but both chips will be replaced by 4MB versions - the E6320 and E6420 respectively.
The best part is that they won't cost any different than the 2MB versions.
When you have finished this cup of coffee your adventure will begin again.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/dualc ore-roundup.html sums things up rather nicely.
Please buy another one next week!
Laws are horrible moral guides, moral guides make even worse laws.
AMD has always been incredibly helpful and suportive of open source. They supply full documentation for their hardware, and even donate hardware to open source projects. Its just ati that has sucked, and even then it wasn't always that way. They used to provide docs before they started trying to seriously compete with nvidia. Give AMD some time to deal with the merger before deciding how the new company will behave.
The real best-kept secret in the CPU world today is the X2 3600+. It's selling on Newegg for $65 right now, and while a dual-core 1.9GHz Athlon 64 isn't going to make Intel tremble, $65 is pretty darn close to Celeron price territory. Apparently the 3600+ overclocks well, too. Really well.
Nah it's a crap design. Doesn't do that well in SPEC CPU 2000 or SPEC CPU 2006 and most real world apps. See: http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/cpu2006.html and http://www.spec.org/cpu/results/cpu2000.html
;), and people to yell at aka support. Whereas Intel has nothing but the CPU.
;).
The fastest Itanium 2 there isn't faster than the fastest x86 in floating point performance or integer performance when you compare quad cores with quad cores, etc.
And look at price, power consumption for the performance you get. Expensive (the same number of transistors in an Itanium 2 system (18MB or even 24MB cache!) will get you a fair number of Core 2 Duo/X2 cores), hot, and only fast in very specific cases. If I wanted an expensive solution that's high performance only in specialized cases I'd be using an ASIC or DSP.
Compare the Itanic with IBM's POWER range and you'll see the problem- if you are going to pick a platform that is expensive, isn't x86 compatible, you might as well switch to IBM's POWER range. You provide the large sums of money and at least IBM will provide the hardware, O/S, apps, the people to blame aka consultants
Scientific computing? go talk to the HPC people nowadays and see what they are buying. They aren't betting on the Itanic.
Database? I don't see how VLIW helps for DB aps. AFAIK Opterons currently (better memory bandwidth) are the way to go for that. Whatever it is, it sure isn't Itanium 2 unless your "Enterprise" DB fits in the 24MB caches of the Itanium.
The advantage of the x86 ISA is that it is CISC and thus fairly dense - think of it as compressed instructions - and nowadays when bandwidth is an issue (memory bandwidth, cache bandwidth etc), CISC isn't so bad. IBM's POWER is pretty dense as well.
x86 is still ugly though. The pig with a jetpack is flying faster than the eagles etc, but it's still a pig
I decided to look for 64-bit and 32-bit comparison charts. So I googled and found one at PCStats.com. So what does zlib Mini-GZIP 1.2.3 32-bit vs. 64-bit benchmark says? It still says Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 (WinXP 64/64 Bit) beats AMD Athlon64 FX-62 (WinXP 64/64 Bit) by roughly 30%. So does 64-bit DivX encoding.
;)
And even at Science Mark 2.0 at which Intel C2Duo is slower than FX-62, switching into 64 bit reduces time needed to run the test from 66.241sec to 21.36.
At least provide some sort of sources when claiming performance drop in 64 bit mode. According to the above benchmark I do want to buy C2Duo and run it in 64-bit mode to do all the gzipping.
By the time consumers will start to care about PCI DMA eating more than 4GB of memory, the new revision of Intel CPU will be out with on-die controller
AMD is the best choice for budget customers right now
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AMD spent a lot of money on improving gcc (for all architectures) while Intel only made their proprietary closed icc compiler.
I think blaming AMD for ATI's old mistakes is a bit premature at this stage.
if AMD continues to drop their prices you'll...not buy from them? Err...k. If AMD plans to do this same type of Bulk Huge price drop, then i will plan to buy intel. Did you mean Intel and not AMD as you stated?
You should both be glad you've actually got some way to purchase processors at a brick & mortar retailer. I'm lucky if I can pick up the right type of RAM around here... Processors, motherboards, decent sound and video cards, and empty computer cases are all out of the question. I have to order absolutely everything on-line and pay for shipping and handling. Very inconvenient when something sizzles and I just want to get back up and running fast.
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