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Intel Reacts To AMD Ryzen Apparently Cutting Prices On Core i7 And i5 Processors (hothardware.com)

Posted by msmash on from the price-war dept.

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.

10 of 224 comments (clear)

  1. No surprise... by thegreatbob · · Score: 5, Insightful

    But, it's a direct admission that they were basically gouging for want of competition.

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    1. Re:No surprise... by alvinrod · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Every company does this, and a lot of people (you don't see many people offering to lower their salary) do as well. Hell, you could probably argue that the new prices for both companies are still gouging for want of competition as I expect that both companies will be making healthy profits which suggests there's still room for prices to come down.

      Ultimately though many people still bought Intel processors at those prices because they found them to be worth the money. You still could have bought an AMD processor at that time, so it isn't as though you were forced to buy Intel. However, the Bulldozer architecture was garbage so most people gladly paid the extra money because they wanted the extra performance.

    2. Re:No surprise... by _KiTA_ · · Score: 5, Interesting

      But, it's a direct admission that they were basically gouging for want of competition.

      Absolutely. My big question is... I have a PC Build coming up. I went Intel 5 years ago due to lack of a realistic AMD alternative. How good is AMD Ryzen? Is it merely competitive with Intel, or are we back to the golden days of "Buy Intel for brand name, buy AMD if you want to save a few hundred bucks for something just as good?"

    3. Re:No surprise... by ravenshrike · · Score: 5, Informative

      Intel appears to edge out in single core performance, but by less than 5-10% depending on processor and we still haven't seen single core performance of Ryzen 5 or 3. Ryzen multi-core performance spanks Intel like a red-headed stepchild. Moreover, this is the first iteration of Ryzen, so performance gains probably have farther to go for things like IPC than Intel's current processors. Basically, unless you're planning on waiting for Coffee lake and believe there will be a greater improvement than another 3% IPC gain, Ryzen is as good or better than Intel's offerings especially with the lower TDP.

    4. Re:No surprise... by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 5, Insightful

      But, it's a direct admission that they were basically gouging for want of competition.

      How much are they gouging? What is the payback period on their R&D? What is the investment in the chip fab to make these things, and how far into the payback period are they now?

      Will these price drops mean that they have to extend the payback period to recoup the costs of the smaller-feature fab? Will that delay the 7nm mass production they've announced for 2020?

      I don't know the answers to these questions. I do know some of the questions to ask. Let's not jump to conclusions without understanding the data.

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    5. Re:No surprise... by Fire_Wraith · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The answer isn't to abolish corporations. You're right in that corporations who are left completely unchecked will act like the worst sorts of human beings, but that holds true for humans as well - if you leave them completely unchecked, a lot of people will do utterly horrible things too. That's why we invented things like laws, society, moral codes, etc, and more importantly, we enforce those (or we try to).

      What we need is to have laws and regulations that are applied to corporations, with the purpose of protecting competition/competitive markets, and that are vigorously enforced. I'm talking about Adam Smith style regulations, mind you, not some right-wing fever dream of government drunk with power regulating every last detail (though areas that are natural monopolies are going to need more stringent regulation, by their very nature). Think instead of Teddy Roosevelt style trust-busting, breaking up cartels and fighting for real competition and alternatives.

      And we used to have that, too. The problem is that we grew complacent, and enforcement of those laws has grown lax - mostly because the worst among the corporations have lobbied heavily for it, and their wealthy owners have done the same. Part of the answer is probably to find ways to diminish the influence of money in politics (though I'm not aware of any easy solutions for that), but more realistically, people just need to start paying attention and voting with this in mind.

    6. Re:No surprise... by StikyPad · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I'm not saying I like it, or agree with it, but maximizing profits is different from gouging. Maximizing profits is a legal obligation to shareholders for publicly traded companies such Intel. Gouging is the exploitation of exigent circumstances such as a natural disaster in order to maximize profits. Gouging is unethical, and in some cases illegal, but it's not what Intel was doing.

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  2. Much ado about nothing.. for now.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  3. Buy AMD & Support a Healthy CPU Marketplace by supercell · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. Optimisitc by sexconker · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.