by Anton Shilov
04/09/2007 | 04:41 AM
Advanced Micro Devices on Monday officially reduced prices of its desktop microprocessors, making dual-core chips available at less than $100 price-points and reducing the price of its top-of-the-range offerings from $999 to $799. The price-cut may boost interest towards AMD’s microprocessors, but the fierce price war with Intel reduces both chipmakers’ profits.
<%BANNER[article]%>The furious competition from Intel’s Extreme processor series has forced AMD to start selling two Athlon 64 FX microprocessors for $999, the price-point of one former top-of-the-range offering, and now the firm had to reduce the price-tag on its fastest desktop solution that consists of two AMD Athlon 64 FX-74 chips by 20% to $799. In addition, AMD removed AMD Athlon 64 FX-70 and FX-62 central processing units from its price-list, leaving only two processor bundles – FX-72 and FX-74 – in the family.
AMD’s dual-core Athlon 64 X2 family also faced significant price slashes from 23% to 48%, making the fastest desktop processor from the company – AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ – to cost $241. The least expensive dual-core chips from AMD – Athlon 64 X2 4000+, X2 3800+ and X2 3600+ – now cost $104, $83 and $72 in 1000-unit quantities, making two processing engines from AMD available in value segment.
The family of single-core processors from Advanced Micro Devices also became tangibly more affordable after the price-slash. The most advanced single-core chip, Athlon 64 4000+, by AMD now costs $92, whereas the cheapest, Sempron 3000+, is available at $31 in 1000-unit quantities.
At the new price-points price-performance ratio of AMD Athlon 64 X2 processors looks better, in some cases, when compared to Intel Core 2 Duo. Considering that in a lot of cases mainboards for AMD’s chips are sold at lower price-points compared to similar motherboards for Intel’s central processing units, AMD’s Athlon 64 X2 lineup may gain additional popularity primarily among system integrators.