by Anna Filatova
03/26/2002 | 10:35 PM
It seemed that there is no room for further Pentium 4 chipset price drops already, as they already cost $20 per unit in mass supplies (while the production cost of the chipset is around $12-$15). However, this news story changed my vision of this problem completely. It turns out quite possible, when each of the competitors has its own goals to achieve. As for SiS, they should be pretty used already to selling their chipsets at prices below $20, as this way they take a away a market share from VIA, which appears also forced to reduce the chipsets cost, especially since they are under Intel’s cloud. Intel also doesn’t waste the time and keep dropping the chipset prices, so that they start selling even better despite higher cost (around $30).
All this resulted into the fact that the largest mainboard makers are already purchasing SiS645 chipsets and VIA P4X266A for less than 420 per unit (P4X333 hasn’t yet started shipping in mass quantities). For us it means that very soon we should be able to get a Pentium 4 mainboard for some $70-$80.