by Anton Shilov
09/01/2005 | 11:33 PM
Advanced Micro Devices reduced pricing of dual-core AMD Opteron processors on Thursday. The reduction should attract attention of server makers to the chips and increase pressure on rival Intel Corp, who yet has to introduce its dual-core central processing units designed for servers.
<%BANNER[article]%>The price cut was quite substantial and in the range of 19% - 29%. After the reduction, the most powerful chip for multiprocessor servers – AMD Opteron model 875 – costs $2149, whereas the fastest dual-core chip for dual-processor (DP) servers can be obtained for $1051 in 1000-unit quantities. The most affordable product with two processing engines for DP applications – AMD Opteron 260 – is now priced at $690.
Dual-core AMD Opteron processors feature dual-channel PC3200 memory controller, 2MB L2 cache (1MB of L2 cache per core), SSE3 technology and are to be made using 90nm process technology.
Intel Corp. is expected to introduce its first dual-core server chips in the fourth quarter this year and AMD’s price-cut should increase competitiveness of dual-core AMD Opteron products when compared to similar chips from the company’s arch-rival.
AMD did not issue any official statements regarding the price slash of server processors, but reflected the change in its online price-list.