by Anna Filatova
04/10/2002 | 10:27 PM
Having lived through some upsurge in the first months of the year, the mainboard sales started moving down again, so that the chipset prices dropped to a scarily low limit. According to the reports coming from the Big Four members, they are now getting the pretty popular SiS645 chipset for $15 per unit. Moreover, some of the last orders contained the price set to… $9.50 (the production cost of SiS645 lies approximately around $12 plus license fees to Intel). It seems that SiS is trying to sell out the old SiS645 as quickly as possible and give way to more up-to-date SiS645DX. I don’t have any other explanation of what could push SiS to start selling chipsets at a price lower than the production costs even (I doubt that it is all about charity :)
But this is not the end of the story. Intel is also forced to reduce the prices, as the competitors start pressing too hard. The company is selling i845 B0-stepping chipset (with DDR SDRAM support) to the Big Four members for $24. To tell the truth, this is a certain record for Intel’s mass chipsets. Not so long ago only i810 family could boast low prices like that. <%BANNER[article]%>
As for VIA chipset prices, the situation is still not very clear. What I know is that P4X266A cost a little bit below $20 in the end of March (see this news story). However, they will hardly keep reducing the prices, as they have no fabs of their own.