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Intel Reacts To AMD Ryzen Apparently Cutting Prices On Core i7 And i5 Processors (hothardware.com)
Less than a week after AMD announced the first line up of Ryzen processors, Intel is apparently fighting back by dropping the price of several of its processors. Rob Williams, writing for HotHardware: So, what we're seeing now are a bunch of Intel processors dropping in price, perhaps as a bit of a preemptive strike against AMD's chips shipping later this week -- though admittedly it's still a bit too early to tell. Over at Amazon, the prices have been slower to fall, but we'd highly recommend that you keep an eye on the following pages, if you are looking for a good deal this week. So far, at Micro Center we've seen the beefy six-core Intel Core i7-6850K (3.60GHz) drop from $700 to $550, and the i7-6800K (3.40GHz) drop down to $360, from $500. Also, some mid-range chips are receiving price cuts as well. Those include the i7-6700K, a 4.0GHz chip dropping from $400 to $260, and the i7-6600K, a 3.50GHz quad-core part dropping from $270 to $180. Even Intel's latest and greatest Kaby Lake-based i7-7700K has experienced a drop, from $380 to $299, with places like Amazon and NewEgg retailing for $349.
But, it's a direct admission that they were basically gouging for want of competition.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
AMD is dead. Long live AMD
The centerpiece of this 'article' seems to focus on Microcenter, which ALWAYS has priced drops and sales like this going on.
Everybody take a deep breath and see where we're at this time next month.
Holy moly! Intel's initial markups must have been higher than Lindsay Lohan on an average Tuesday.
Open that vault of money you've been sitting on Intel. That'll shock the market right away and steal that thunder from AMD.
Until then why should a user get less cores for more money?
Wheel of Time: Book by Book and Sumview (summary review) Bigdady92 style: http://bigdady92.blogspot.com/
Way to plug my favorite store!
It does seems as though this chain has really exploded in the last several years. I seem to recall there only being a handful of them. Now there are over 2 dozen nationwide.
Kind of surprising that a brick-and-mortar store is expanding operations in this day and age. Especially with the old-school commission-based sales floor model.
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
unless people actually buy AMD. It's not a good day when you have to hope consumers will be rational.
It's not just that their chips are usually a better value but without AMD you would have a monopolistic Intel charging through the nose with minimal innovation.
I've bought a lot of AMD processors over the years, and while I'll admit they haven't been as competitive as Intel the past many years, I hope Ryzen proves successful. Consumers need decent competition to keep Intel from gouging everybody.
The benefits of increased competition in the CPU market are already showing. Regardless of what Intel do everyone should buy AMD to give them a much needed cash injection, which will hopefully allow them to continue to develop competitive CPUs. Intel have become extremely uncompetitive, charging high prices for CPUs that offer virtually no improvement over the previous generation. Intel needs competition to get them working again.
I suggest everyone buy AMD, until there is a sucessful compeitor to Intel they will continue to price gouge, as evidence by these overpriced chips.
I had no idea that Ryzen could apparently cut prices on Core i7 and i5 processors.
Good grief. Grammar. Learn it. Use it.
This is a typical marketing technique used by many stores especially Micro Center in the US. They sell something extremely cheap, but require you to buy it in store or pick it up in store, because the average person will end up buying other items while there. They make up for any loss they may have sold the original item at.
Since this is completely typical of Micro Center and we are seeing slower and smaller discounts everywhere else, it would suggest this isn't so much a price drop. It could be also sellers are concerned about smaller profits after AMD's release. Intel will probably wait until AMD's product is available before making any adjustments to price.
It'll be a cold day in heck before we in the UK see price cuts like these...
I've had AMD in the past, when they were good (pre Phenom days). Then I switched to Intel. It seems like AMD are finally getting serious again, that's good. Because with the rumors flying that Intel is soon going to be supporting Windows only on their chips, there is no fucking way I will continue to buy from them if this turns out to be true.
Price is only a secondary concern. It was important when you were buying a new rig every year. But since the pace of progress has slowed, I don't mind shelling out more for a CPU because I know it's going to last me a good 5+ years and then some. Now what I find important is retaining control over my machine.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
This is great news, especially for people who don't have to have/build the latest and greatest. I am still happily running an intel Core2 Quad Core. But this means that the price of lower end parts, and used parts, should go down accordingly. The top of the line parts of today will be the hand-me-downs of tomorrow. My kids all have hand-me-down computers that are very capable for the things they do.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Everyone and their mother are slobbering over the comparison between Intel and AMD. I'm more interested in a comparison between the AMD FX-8300 (AM3 platform) versus the AMD Ryzen 1700 (AM4 platform). I had to replace my nine-year-old Vista-compatible motherboard for a newer motherboard and swapped out the quad-core for an eight-core because Ryzen wasn't out last year. Not sure if upgrading to Ryzen is worth the extra $500 for processor, motherboard and memory.
These intel price cuts wouldn't exist without AMD's presence, and if you want that to continue, and if AMD makes a good product, buy AMD.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
I've always stuck with AMD processors even when they weren't the fastest (I'm typing on a 1100T right now) because I don't want Intel to be a monopoly. If you like high CPU prices buy Intel-- if not support AMD. For me it's that simple. I hope there are others with the same mindset. Once a company doesn't have competition they started doing things to their customers that they wouldn't get away with otherwise (think DRM controls, OS selectivity, etc.) I just hope they don't try and build a model where you don't actually own a processor... you can only buy a license to use it, and then have to pay $x per month (I'm sure it's coming... just wait).
I don't see AMD as inferior. In fact, Intel licenses some tech from AMD.
Cost is the only factor in my opinion. Inching out a couple more CPU cycles for twice as much money is counter productive (again, my opinion). 99% of the market really does not need the performance of a i7-7700K, where an AMD APU from last-gen is probably still overkill.
My 4ish year old AMD FX-8320 does way more than I actually need. I'm upgrading to a Ryzen 1700 (the 65w TDP chip) simply because I want something newer, as in my experience electronics will fail in the next 5 years.
Also, I intend to re-purpose my old workstation for my wife and kids to use. Now that my kids are big enough to start learning computers, they need something that isn't my work computer.
Intel really has no advantage over AMD, and if you're going by benchmarks, you're splitting hairs as real world percieved performance hit it's peak with the general population years ago.
Intel gained their advantage by bribing manufacturers to use their products. Just as Microsoft does. There is no other reason they are in 90% of consumer end products.
I build custom computers for family, friends, and clients of mine. I've almost always gone AMD because it's a better performance:cost ratio, especially in the mid-range arena. It's not just the CPUs price factored in, either. AMD motherboards generally come in at 50-75% the price compared to Intel Motherboards.
The few Intel builds I've done were for performance die hards, spending $4000+ because they believed that Intel was the end-all, be-all, even though the games they play are hitting GPU bottlenecks, and the CPU is sitting there at 50+% idle. Could have saved $500+ to put into a better GPU... but people don't listen when they go by forum posts of evangelists claiming Intel is the best thing since sliced bread, even though their $1200 CPU only bests AMDs $400 CPU by 10%-15% at best.
The parent is correct. Micro Center typically sells CPUs at a discount. It's one of the great things about living near one. But their prices are not representative of Intel's normal MSRPs, and importantly, what you'll pay for their products everywhere else.
Not necessarily.
It costs several billion dollars to build or upgrade a fab. Intel spends about $10 billion each year on upgrading its equipment, and $12 bilion on R&D. In order to survive, they need to have a high gross profit on each unit sold, in order to recover the $50 billion or so they spent getting ready to build a new processor. In other words, they could make $200 per cpu, and still lose money overall.
Let's work through it with smaller numbers to demonstrate the concept.
Suppose you buy a machine for $100,000 in order to make widgets.
You materials cost is $1/widget.
Hoping to make your $100,000 back, you start selling widgets for $5 each.
After selling 10,000 widgets, you've received $50,000, and spent $110,00.
Your currently $60,000 in the hole.
Your neighbor starts selling widgets for $3 each.
Should you match the $3 price in order to keep selling widgets?
Yes, you want to sell more widgets, so you'll need to match the $3 price.
That doesn't mean you were "gouging", or even recovering your costs at $5. It means only that your MARGINAL cost to produce one MORE widget is less than $3. You may still lose money overall, because you haven't got your $100,000 capital expenditure back yet.
A representative republic? IOW, a system that doesn't allow consumers to vote for specific laws.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Everybody is forgetting the $50 billion Intel had to spend before they could even start making these CPUs. Intel might lose money at even the "old" (non-Microcenter) price.
It costs several billion dollars to build or upgrade a fab. Intel spends about $10 billion each year on upgrading its equipment, and $12 bilion on R&D. In order to survive, they need to have a high gross profit on each unit sold, in order to recover the $50 billion or so they spent getting ready to build a new processor. In other words, they could make $200 per cpu, and still lose money overall.
Let's work through it with smaller numbers to demonstrate the concept.
Suppose you buy a machine for $100,000 in order to make widgets.
You materials cost is $1/widget.
Hoping to make your $100,000 back, you start selling widgets for $5 each.
After selling 10,000 widgets, you've received $50,000, and spent $110,00.
Your currently $60,000 in the hole.
Your neighbor starts selling widgets for $3 each.
Should you match the $3 price in order to keep selling widgets?
Yes, you want to sell more widgets, so you'll need to match the $3 price.
That doesn't mean you were "gouging", or even recovering your costs at $5. It means only that your MARGINAL cost to produce one MORE widget is less than $3. You may still lose money overall, because you haven't got your $100,000 capital expenditure back yet.
My AMD octo core fx8120 is still going strong after five years too, with a recent rx480 video card. I'll be snagging a ryzen rig anyway. Not because I need it, but because I want it. Plus it'll help keep Doom3/WHTW above 30fps in 4k
Okay, I'll play along. Each year Intel spends $10 billion on fab upgrades and $13 billion on R&D. So the cost was about $50 billion to get ready to make this generation of CPUs. Based on the $50 billion up-front cost, what do you think the retail price should be?
The few Intel builds I've done were for performance die hards, spending $4000+ because they believed that Intel was the end-all, be-all, even though the games they play are hitting GPU bottlenecks, and the CPU is sitting there at 50+% idle. Could have saved $500+ to put into a better GPU... but people don't listen when they go by forum posts of evangelists claiming Intel is the best thing since sliced bread, even though their $1200 CPU only bests AMDs $400 CPU by 10%-15% at best.
I think you may be setting up a bit of a strawman argument by comparing $1000+ Intel processors with $400 AMD processors. I'm not even sure which AMD processors you are talking about since an FX-9590 or FX-8350 are both between $150-$200.
When most enthusiasts are building a computer and choosing between Intel or AMD, I would say they are probably comparing an Intel i7-6800K to an AMD FX-8350. That would be $410 vs $150, 13575 Passmark vs 8938, 33 Passmark per $ vs 60 Passmark per $, 140W vs 125 W, 97 Passmark per Watt vs 72 Passmark per Watt.
No one is doubting that AMD is better in performance per dollar, but in reality you are only talking about a $260 difference not $500+. For that extra money you get a 50%+ faster processor, not 10%-15%. Performance per dollar may be important if you are building a server farm, but you generally only have one personal computer so in that case total performance is far more important. If you really had to choose squeeze out some savings so you can upgrade a GeForce GTX 1070 to a 1080 ($200 difference) then I guess AMD is a reasonable trade-off, but honestly if $200 is that big of a deal don't spend $500+ on a video card in the first place.
I concede that AMD is almost certainly the better option for sub-$1000 computers, but I strongly disagree it is the better choice for high end machines.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
AMD has no fabrication facilities, They buy them on the open market from Taiwan Semi or Global Foundry or other.... This cost to upgrade fab is not part of their price so they have the open market working in their favor. Presumably Intel thinks it can do better than the open market.
Everything we've seen about Ryzen indicates that it'll deliver amazing performance per dollar.
We need official street pricing, more benchmarks, and OEM offerings. Most desktops and virtually all laptops are prebuilt. It's up to the OEMs to not take bribes from Intel and build products around Ryzen. With the support we've seen for Polaris in laptops, I think the outlook is good.
We've got no idea what they've got planned for servers. I hope we see something soon, because it takes much longer for vendors to build a server around a new CPU and socket than a desktop or laptop. Intel's desktop CPU prices are grossly inflated, but their Xeon prices are barbaric. If Ryzen can offer a similar value proposition in the server market as it seems to in the desktop market, then that means I can go with AMD and lose some single-threaded performance, gain multi-threaded performance (as I'll have more cores), and save a bunch of cash. I can use that cash to get more RAM and more/better flash.
If AMD can get some mindshare back, then Intel is going to be forced to compete or at least slash prices. I do believe that mindshare still starts with the nerds building their own PCs. If AMD can get an average Joe to hear about "Ryzen", then when OEMs do put out their offerings they stand to claw back a lot of marketshare.
We've also got Vega on the GPU side. Polaris is an amazing performance/$ architecture, but we've seen very little of Vega. Nvidia is poised to release the (almost) full size Pascal chip soon too (presumably as a new Titan or 1080 Ti SKU). What we've seen of Vega has it beating out the 1080 by a moderate margin. Going purely based on die sizes from the full GP100 Pascal chip from the Tesla products, we can forecast that a 1080 Ti / Titan Whatever will blow the existing 1080 out of the water. Vega will either have to be a huge surprise in terms of performance or as great a value as Polaris to claw some desktop GPU marketshare back.
If the next Xbox and Playstation ever materialize they'll likely stick with AMD for both the GPU and CPU for ease of backwards compatibility, and they will almost certainly be running Ryzen & Vega. AMD lost Nintendo this time around, with Nvidia powering the Switch. Even before it releases there are rumors of a "Pro" or upgraded model running on the Tegra X2 platform instead of the Tegra X1. I doubt we'll see such a thing for at least a full year. (At which point Tegra X3 will be out.) AMD still has at least one unannounced contract for a custom design. It's almost certainly for the Xbox Scorpio, and we'll get the reveal at E3.
If what we've seen of Ryzen holds true, and if Vega is competitive, AMD is going to have a great 12-18 months.
Buying an inferior product to "stick it to" a competitor who actually is better and infinitesimally more expensive
Keeping a competitor in business helps the market leader remain "infinitesimally more expensive" rather than Daraprim expensive.
I always buy AMD, and will buy the new Ryzen. I have always liked the price points AMD has.
Scott Carr
"Monopolistic Corporate Drops Prices When Competitor Release Better Product Cheaper"
> Presumably Intel thinks it can do better than the open market.
And empirically they do in fact get better per-core, single-threaded performance. Performance per dollar and per watt, they often lose. Their priority is single threaded performance, and their approach does achieve that goal.
How good Ryzen is is, unfortunately, not the right question.
The right question is 'Has AMD managed to produce a chipset not so full of bugs that you will need toi reinstall everything every 12 months'
The biggest problem with AMD has historically been TERRIBLE drivers, that are only semi-stable.
Now, some people will think I am shilling there, but no.. I run several AMD machines, here, and the drivers are just terrible. I am in the process now
of trying to recover an AMD soft-raid1 pair that spontaneously went bad and refuses to boot - even after a full OS reinstall!
Whereas Intel chipsets tend to be a rock, which is a pity, as they definitely gouge on CPU proces.
> Presumably Intel thinks it can do better than the open market.
And empirically they do in fact get better per-core, single-threaded performance. Performance per dollar and per watt, they often lose. Their priority is single threaded performance, and their approach does achieve that goal.
More significantly it pays less per unit area of silicon and gets more logic into that unit area of silicon than anyone else on the planet.
Intel's priority is making margin on selling silicon. They succeed at this and it is why they are profitable. They are able to set the price at a point where they are making money while a fabless competitor is making 0% margin because it costs more to contract out the manufacture of the same amount of logic.
Certainly based just on the price drop, you wouldn't know if they ever made money. HP drastically dropped the price on their WebOS devices. Was that because they were making too much money at the original price? No, it's because they weren't making any money at the original price, they lost money on the whole project. They adjusted the price (downward) to minimize their losses.
In fact, Intel's gross profit margin was around 20% last year. Now they dropped their prices* by about 20%, meaning the new price would have been the break-even point for them. They wouldn't have made any money on the project if they hadn't sold any at the higher price.
* actually MICROCENTER reduced their price. The summary is misleading, as they normally are.
I live in Canada. Our prices are different.
At the time of build in question, the most expensive, highest performing AMD CPU was about $400 CAD, where the Intel was $1200 (not sure of the model at the time, I'll have to go back through my receipts to check).
I'm glad some competition from AMD is giving Intel a since of urgency about staying competitive. Certainly in the long run, Intel can see that most processors these days are ARM, so they can't rest on their laurels. AMD's apparent success lets Intel know they have to play their "A game" in the short run as well.
Will this also affect MacBooks that use Intel CPUs soon?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Don't expect to ever see prices from Intel like that ever again if you let them drive AMD out of business with their predatory pricing scheme.
What's the proximal cause of Intel's new, more reasonable prices? AMD.
Which company consistently comes to market with reasonably priced CPUs? AMD.
Which company is pushing the price/ performance ration in a direction favorable to you, the consumer? AMD.
Which company's bottom line do you want to secure for your own future's sake? AMD.
The most important question stays unanswered: when will we get modern processors without low-level backdoors like IME (intel) or PSP (AMD)?