X-bit labs

April Confrontation: AMD and Intel Start the Price War (page 11)

Category: CPU

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 03/28/2007 | 05:18 PM ]

Conclusion

Very soon both manufacturers of x86 processors will reduce the official prices on their products. This price reduction is going to be impressively huge: some dual-core mainstream processors will start selling at almost half the price, and other inexpensive processor models will also get much cheaper. Thanks to our test session and some data on the price-lists changes that we managed to uncover at this time give us unique opportunity to draw some conclusions about the results of the April price war round.

We cannot accuse AMD and Intel of the absence of mutual coordination. This time is going to be no exception. Upcoming price-list changes are very closely connected with one another. According to our test results, April price drop will not disturb the price-to-performance ratio for the solutions from different manufacturers. All in all, priced similarly Athlon 64 X2 and Core 2 Duo CPUs will demonstrate about the same performance level. And although, if we take a closer look at the results, there are certainly some deviations from this rule, they are not so crucial.

So, even though AMD gave in to Intel in the High-End market segment, they managed to change their CPU pricing in the mainstream and budget segments in a very efficient way. In other words, since K8 micro-architecture doesn’t allow AMD to design CPUs as fast as Core 2 Duo, the company manipulates the price of its products so that they still remain quite demanded by the consumers.

However, from a certain prospective Athlon 64 X2 still loses to competitors. These processors have almost exhausted their frequency potential by now, which made them not so attractive for overclocking fans. Pretty scarce overclocking results make this processor family very vulnerable, as the overclocking potential of their rivals, Core 2 Duo family, still lets overclockers hit some impressive heights.