Posted by
ryuzaki0
on from the stuff-to-read dept.
wopr writes "It's just a
rumor,
but
c't
is reporting that the PIII 600 will be released cheaper than AMD's K7 600. The article is in german, but the
babelfish
can take care of it. "
Also, it has to be noted that Intel provides more of a 'package' to it's OEMs...
Also, part of the package Intel has is long term contracts and marketing arrangements such as the Intel Inside campaign, which locks OEMs into using Intel chips in return for sponsored advertising.
This pretty much consigns AMD to the home/consumer and white box market. The major vendors such as Dell and Compaq probably couldn't used AMD chips in their "Business Desktops" without some serious renegotiation. --
Translation from babelfish
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 3
(I'll let you clean up the English)
Intel undercuts AMDs price
In view of the forthcoming launching of a vessel of AMDs flagship K7 " Athlon " accesses Intel to the extreme one: For the first time the processor giant undercuts the price of the directly comparable competition product of competitor AMD. The Pentium III with 600 mc/s, which Intel wants to throw two weeks before the AMD Premierenfeier in running, will be clearly cheaper after c't information than the fire-new 600-MHz-Athlon. Its price determined AMD to 699 US Dollar, while Intel had advised a OEM price of 823 US Dollar (with acceptance of 1000 pieces) until recently for the 600-MHz-P III. Still before start of sales of the Athlon Intel thereby seems to recognize its advance in performance. An outline of the bench mark results published so far brings c't in output 14/99 (starting from Monday at the kiosk).
Whether AMD can be pleased about this respect proof of the powerful competitor, is however questionable. The processor prozessorschmiede fights with high losses, all hopes rests with AMD
This is just further proof that Intel isn't out to make quality chips anymore, they're just out to gain market share. Intel isn't about making quality products, they're a marketing company.
AMD (who I don't particulary favor, but I respect the competition) introduced their 486 clone, and Intel pretty much kept the price of their 486 the same. AMD simply wasn't a threat to Intel. Now, however, more and more people are buying systems with the AMD processor in it, and Intel is starting to get worried. So they drop the price of their processors. That's how competition works. However while AMD is keeping their products up with their standards, Intel is lowering their standards, and introducing shoddy products that would be better given more development time.
Windows 95 was shipped WAY before it was ready. Same thing happened with the Pentium, as well as the Pentium III.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
--
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.:P)
It's a giant game of chicken
by
tlewis
·
· Score: 2
Intel is trying to run AMD out of cash before AMD makes it into the giant cash horde of server-class chips. If they succede, then AMD will be dead, dead, dead. If they don't, then they will never be able to destroy AMD, and they will never again be able to command the kinds of premiums that they do today on, e.g., Xeons.
I'm rooting for AMD and will be buying an Althon on principle. Competition rules, monopolies suck, and competitors trying to bust up monopolies deserve consumers' support.
Re:Two households, both alike in dignity...
by
IntlHarvester
·
· Score: 2
Hey, actually/. is a place for the kind of computer enthusiasts who brag about keeping their 386s in service with Linux!
Actually, the problem that both Intel and AMD face is the declining returns of faster CPU speeds. I run a P5-133 at home and a PII-350? at work, and other than than booting NT, there's almost no perceptual difference between the two. Of course the home machine has SCSI, better video, and more memory, but by spec, the CPU in the PII should be 3-4x faster. (Other than MAME, I don't really play any games however.)
The real problem here is that Intel is squeezing the OEMs by the balls. The "Intel Inside" marketing lock-in ensures that the big vendors have their offerings up to Intel's latest clock speeds, but the market demands a $1200 PC. Well, if you're Compaq or Dell, how are you going to to build a $1200 PC with a $700 CPU and still try to make any money? Cut corners, that's how. Hence, crappy video and disk subsystems, and a bunch of crap components ready to die and get thrown away in 2 years.
Even for the price difference between a PIII-450 and a PIII-550, they could more than double the memory or get a better video accelerator. Hell, even Windows 98 is going to work better and play better with 128MB of RAM instead of the standard 64MB.
Compaq, Dell, et al have been sucking at Intel's teet for so long that they haven't been serving their customers, and they haven't realized that they've consigned themselves for making a 2% profit margin screwing hard drives into essentially Intel-manfuactured systems. If it hadn't been the rise of big high-profit x86 servers (thank NT for that!), all of these clowns would be out of business. (And watch while Intel destroys the server profit center by driving commodity machines into that market.)
Hopefully, people will get past these magic megahertz numbers and realize that the only difference between this year's K7 or PIII and a Pentium Pro from three years ago is an barely perceptable increase in Quake frame rate or RC5 or kernel complies or whatever. I know everyone on slashdot loves the latest and greatest, but we're way beyond the point where any of this stuff makes any real difference.
(End of rant - too much coffee consumed already.) --
Re:Carmack's impressed
by
IntlHarvester
·
· Score: 2
The high end gaming market is a pretty signifcant profit center for all these companies, so Quake numbers will certainly help AMD a little.
However, the real money and market share in the PC business is volume, and that means business desktops and low-end home machines. These machines ususally ship with really cheap video systems such as S3 or the Intel one. --
AMD sold more processors than Intel in desktop machines in the first quarter of this year. Intel does not have 90%, it's more like 43% (desktop market).
Re:Apples and Oranges - no, CPU and CPU
by
MindStalker
·
· Score: 2
The point is that they could have called the P-III a seventh generation processor, but the point is its not. There is little to no change from the P-II to the P-III they both are classified as P6's (damn if I didn't know better those numbers would confused the hell outta me) sorta in the same way as the 486 DX wasn't much different from the 486SX (ok ok it did have that weird thing they tried to pass off as a FPU). Though accually if Intel had contested they could have easily got away with calling the P-II a 7th generation processor, as it went from socket 7 to slot 1. but they chose not to. To late! (the Pentium I was a P6 right?..)
I'm sorry, but my dad used to work in a waffer fab, and I know for a fact that thay cost WAY more than a dime to produce. They in fact do cost about $50 to $75 per chip, not per waffer. FYI CPUs are made on waffers, with the best quality ones most commonly in the middle. As for the celeron, yes, most of the R&D was done, but "underclocking" them is a ridiculous prospect. The mearly used a cheaper and less effective manufaturing process. That, and as an important note, no internal l2 cache like the PII. Thats where they really saved money.
Yeah, but that's really hard to establish in this case. Take the Celeron example. They aren't selling them below cost, teechically. They're probably making a decent per-unit profit. But that doesn't take into account R&D. They'll still living off of the PPro R&D, and almost no research went into creating the Celeron (relative to other chips). A good portion of the cost of the chip is the research that went into it, and in this case, they might actually get away with "dumping" (I doubt it, though). You can't say, "Hey, it cost you more to develop that than you're selling it for!" because they might be able to milk it for another 5 years (PPro), though I doubt it. The only way they'd get caught for dumping is if they sold below the per-unit cost.
And it was even cheaper. Isn't it a little strange that Intel can drop the price of a chipset that much simply because of a competitor? Doesn't it make it obvious that their chips have had hugely inflated prices?
Sure, AMD's Athlon probably has a hugely inflated price, too, but it was planned to be a lot cheaper than the slower competing chips from Intel.
By offering a worse product, and then CONFIRMING that it's worse by making it cheaper than the competition, Intel is giving away the perception that their chips are the 'genuine article' and the choice for 'serious' users running workstations and servers.
AMD's problem has always been their second-fiddle market status. They can't make any money because no one wants to buy a knock-off processor unless they can get it cheap.
If Intel does this, then it will be clear to everyone that the K7 is the new standard in x86-compatible chips.
If Intel doesn't get it's act together, maybe in a year or two we'll be calling them Athlon-compatible.
AMD K7 benchmarks from John Carmack!
by
crt
·
· Score: 2
Carmack has posted some Timedemo benchmarks for the K7.. VERY interesting reading.
Nope... although Intel delayed Coppermine, it's going to make a Katmai based P3/600 sooner. The Coppermine P3/600 will be a lot nicer though (it'll run much cooler, faster, etc.)
1. Intel makes a profit on all of their chips. With the possible exception of the bottom of the Celeron line, which may come in right at cost. So accusations of dumping are unlikely to fly in the courts.
2. If you really believed in competition, why would you announce that you are going to buy an Athlon "on principle"? If you said, "well, it costs more, but it performs better" then I could see that as supporting competition, but the nature of competition is to reward success to the best product on the market, and price will always be a factor in determining the 'best product'.
3. There is a lot of complaining about Intel 'announcing price cuts for an unreleased product', but this is just a rumor, not an announcement. However, AMD *has* announced prices for chips unlikely to make it to market in the next several months, so that customers could see how much cheaper a -2 month old 550 MHz Athlon is in comparison to a current PIII-550.
4. How else can Intel compete in the short term other than through determining their schedule of pricing? I'm sure that the R&D bosses are under the gun to deliver something to beat Athlon in the desktop market, but you can only design VLSI chips so rapidly.
I'm excited about Athlon (despite the name). I love the prospect of real cometition. I would love to own one. Or several. But I'm not going to blame Intel for reacting to AMD as if they were actually competing. And I'm positive that if the tables were reversed that AMD would be pushing aggressively on Intel.
seamus
Two households, both alike in dignity...
by
tenatious
·
· Score: 2
I know/. is a place for computer enthusiasts, but lets be real. If the PIII 600 serves your needs and it costs less than the Athlon, you'll buy the PIII. If you need more power (that is speculation--no independent tests yet), and you don't mind spending a few dollars more (again, speculation--I don't know what the chips will cost consumers), you'll buy the Athlon.
Me? I'm plugging away on a P5 150. All I do is HTML editing, usually with a little old text editor, some word processing, a few small spreadsheets, some coding, and websurfing. What the hell do I need a PIII or an Athlon for? (Umm, oh yeah, so I can get SETI@home blocks done in under 24 hours[snicker]) It'd be like buying a Ferrari to haul trash to the dump. The vehicle just doesn't fit the task.
Once in a while I catch myself saying, "Man, you've got to get a new machine." But then I remember that for a few seconds longer on boot and load of applications, I save myself a couple of hundred dollars. I just can't bring myself to spend the $ on a machine that'll do my text editing 10 times faster.
I may not get a new machine until the one I have just plain dies.
Is that cheap, or is it just sensible?
-When the world is running down you make the best of what's still around.
-- The men who hold high places must be the ones who start
to mold a new reality... closer to the heart - RUSH
Slashdot Mirror
Also, it has to be noted that Intel provides more of a 'package' to it's OEMs...
Also, part of the package Intel has is long term contracts and marketing arrangements such as the Intel Inside campaign, which locks OEMs into using Intel chips in return for sponsored advertising.
This pretty much consigns AMD to the home/consumer and white box market. The major vendors such as Dell and Compaq probably couldn't used AMD chips in their "Business Desktops" without some serious renegotiation.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
(I'll let you clean up the English)
Intel undercuts AMDs price
In view of the forthcoming launching of a vessel of AMDs flagship K7 " Athlon " accesses Intel to the extreme one: For the first time the processor giant undercuts the price of the directly comparable competition product of competitor AMD. The Pentium III with 600 mc/s, which Intel wants to throw two weeks before the AMD Premierenfeier in running, will be clearly cheaper after c't information than the fire-new 600-MHz-Athlon. Its price determined AMD to 699 US Dollar, while Intel had advised a OEM price of 823 US Dollar (with acceptance of 1000 pieces) until recently for the 600-MHz-P III. Still before start of sales of the Athlon Intel thereby seems to recognize its advance in performance. An outline of the bench mark results published so far brings c't in output 14/99 (starting from Monday at the kiosk).
Whether AMD can be pleased about this respect proof of the powerful competitor, is however questionable. The processor prozessorschmiede fights with high losses, all hopes rests with AMD
AMD (who I don't particulary favor, but I respect the competition) introduced their 486 clone, and Intel pretty much kept the price of their 486 the same. AMD simply wasn't a threat to Intel. Now, however, more and more people are buying systems with the AMD processor in it, and Intel is starting to get worried. So they drop the price of their processors. That's how competition works. However while AMD is keeping their products up with their standards, Intel is lowering their standards, and introducing shoddy products that would be better given more development time.
Windows 95 was shipped WAY before it was ready. Same thing happened with the Pentium, as well as the Pentium III.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
Intel is trying to run AMD out of cash before AMD
makes it into the giant cash horde of server-class
chips. If they succede, then AMD will be dead,
dead, dead. If they don't, then they will never
be able to destroy AMD, and they will never again
be able to command the kinds of premiums that
they do today on, e.g., Xeons.
I'm rooting for AMD and will be buying an Althon
on principle. Competition rules, monopolies suck,
and competitors trying to bust up monopolies
deserve consumers' support.
Hey, actually /. is a place for the kind of computer enthusiasts who brag about keeping their 386s in service with Linux!
Actually, the problem that both Intel and AMD face is the declining returns of faster CPU speeds. I run a P5-133 at home and a PII-350? at work, and other than than booting NT, there's almost no perceptual difference between the two. Of course the home machine has SCSI, better video, and more memory, but by spec, the CPU in the PII should be 3-4x faster. (Other than MAME, I don't really play any games however.)
The real problem here is that Intel is squeezing the OEMs by the balls. The "Intel Inside" marketing lock-in ensures that the big vendors have their offerings up to Intel's latest clock speeds, but the market demands a $1200 PC. Well, if you're Compaq or Dell, how are you going to to build a $1200 PC with a $700 CPU and still try to make any money? Cut corners, that's how. Hence, crappy video and disk subsystems, and a bunch of crap components ready to die and get thrown away in 2 years.
Even for the price difference between a PIII-450 and a PIII-550, they could more than double the memory or get a better video accelerator. Hell, even Windows 98 is going to work better and play better with 128MB of RAM instead of the standard 64MB.
Compaq, Dell, et al have been sucking at Intel's teet for so long that they haven't been serving their customers, and they haven't realized that they've consigned themselves for making a 2% profit margin screwing hard drives into essentially Intel-manfuactured systems. If it hadn't been the rise of big high-profit x86 servers (thank NT for that!), all of these clowns would be out of business. (And watch while Intel destroys the server profit center by driving commodity machines into that market.)
Hopefully, people will get past these magic megahertz numbers and realize that the only difference between this year's K7 or PIII and a Pentium Pro from three years ago is an barely perceptable increase in Quake frame rate or RC5 or kernel complies or whatever. I know everyone on slashdot loves the latest and greatest, but we're way beyond the point where any of this stuff makes any real difference.
(End of rant - too much coffee consumed already.)
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
The high end gaming market is a pretty signifcant profit center for all these companies, so Quake numbers will certainly help AMD a little.
However, the real money and market share in the PC business is volume, and that means business desktops and low-end home machines. These machines ususally ship with really cheap video systems such as S3 or the Intel one.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
AMD sold more processors than Intel in desktop machines in the first quarter of this year. Intel does not have 90%, it's more like 43% (desktop market).
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
The point is that they could have called the P-III a seventh generation processor, but the point is its not. There is little to no change from the P-II to the P-III they both are classified as P6's (damn if I didn't know better those numbers would confused the hell outta me) sorta in the same way as the 486 DX wasn't much different from the 486SX (ok ok it did have that weird thing they tried to pass off as a FPU). Though accually if Intel had contested they could have easily got away with calling the P-II a 7th generation processor, as it went from socket 7 to slot 1. but they chose not to. To late! (the Pentium I was a P6 right?..)
I'm sorry, but my dad used to work in a waffer fab, and I know for a fact that thay cost WAY more than a dime to produce. They in fact do cost about $50 to $75 per chip, not per waffer. FYI CPUs are made on waffers, with the best quality ones most commonly in the middle. As for the celeron, yes, most of the R&D was done, but "underclocking" them is a ridiculous prospect. The mearly used a cheaper and less effective manufaturing process. That, and as an important note, no internal l2 cache like the PII. Thats where they really saved money.
Yeah, but that's really hard to establish in this case. Take the Celeron example. They aren't selling them below cost, teechically. They're probably making a decent per-unit profit. But that doesn't take into account R&D. They'll still living off of the PPro R&D, and almost no research went into creating the Celeron (relative to other chips). A good portion of the cost of the chip is the research that went into it, and in this case, they might actually get away with "dumping" (I doubt it, though). You can't say, "Hey, it cost you more to develop that than you're selling it for!" because they might be able to milk it for another 5 years (PPro), though I doubt it. The only way they'd get caught for dumping is if they sold below the per-unit cost.
And it was even cheaper. Isn't it a little strange that Intel can drop the price of a chipset that much simply because of a competitor? Doesn't it make it obvious that their chips have had hugely inflated prices?
Sure, AMD's Athlon probably has a hugely inflated price, too, but it was planned to be a lot cheaper than the slower competing chips from Intel.
By offering a worse product, and then CONFIRMING that it's worse by making it cheaper than the competition, Intel is giving away the perception that their chips are the 'genuine article' and the choice for 'serious' users running workstations and servers.
AMD's problem has always been their second-fiddle market status. They can't make any money because no one wants to buy a knock-off processor unless they can get it cheap.
If Intel does this, then it will be clear to everyone that the K7 is the new standard in x86-compatible chips.
If Intel doesn't get it's act together, maybe in a year or two we'll be calling them Athlon-compatible.
Check out the full plan here: http://finger.planetqu ake.com/plan.asp?userid=johnc&id=12549
"AMD K7 cpus are very fast."
Nope... although Intel delayed Coppermine, it's going to make a Katmai based P3/600 sooner. The Coppermine P3/600 will be a lot nicer though (it'll run much cooler, faster, etc.)
1. Intel makes a profit on all of their chips. With the possible exception of the bottom of the Celeron line, which may come in right at cost. So accusations of dumping are unlikely to fly in the courts.
2. If you really believed in competition, why would you announce that you are going to buy an Athlon "on principle"? If you said, "well, it costs more, but it performs better" then I could see that as supporting competition, but the nature of competition is to reward success to the best product on the market, and price will always be a factor in determining the 'best product'.
3. There is a lot of complaining about Intel 'announcing price cuts for an unreleased product', but this is just a rumor, not an announcement. However, AMD *has* announced prices for chips unlikely to make it to market in the next several months, so that customers could see how much cheaper a -2 month old 550 MHz Athlon is in comparison to a current PIII-550.
4. How else can Intel compete in the short term other than through determining their schedule of pricing? I'm sure that the R&D bosses are under the gun to deliver something to beat Athlon in the desktop market, but you can only design VLSI chips so rapidly.
I'm excited about Athlon (despite the name). I love the prospect of real cometition. I would love to own one. Or several. But I'm not going to blame Intel for reacting to AMD as if they were actually competing. And I'm positive that if the tables were reversed that AMD would be pushing aggressively on Intel.
seamus
I know /. is a place for computer enthusiasts, but lets be real. If the PIII 600 serves your needs and it costs less than the Athlon, you'll buy the PIII. If you need more power (that is speculation--no independent tests yet), and you don't mind spending a few dollars more (again, speculation--I don't know what the chips will cost consumers), you'll buy the Athlon.
Me? I'm plugging away on a P5 150. All I do is HTML editing, usually with a little old text editor, some word processing, a few small spreadsheets, some coding, and websurfing. What the hell do I need a PIII or an Athlon for? (Umm, oh yeah, so I can get SETI@home blocks done in under 24 hours[snicker]) It'd be like buying a Ferrari to haul trash to the dump. The vehicle just doesn't fit the task.
Once in a while I catch myself saying, "Man, you've got to get a new machine." But then I remember that for a few seconds longer on boot and load of applications, I save myself a couple of hundred dollars. I just can't bring myself to spend the $ on a machine that'll do my text editing 10 times faster.
I may not get a new machine until the one I have just plain dies.
Is that cheap, or is it just sensible?
-When the world is running down
you make the best of what's still around.
The men who hold high places must be the ones who start to mold a new reality... closer to the heart - RUSH