by Anna Filatova
03/25/2002 | 06:18 AM
All of us are very much surprised with the fact that the retail price of AMD CPUs is almost always lower than the wholesale price per piece for 1,000-unit quantities. This is a really amazing and not quite well understood phenomenon, however, AMD is not the only processor manufacturer, which officially sets the prices higher. Intel also does the same thing, though not with the CPUs but with the chipsets. I really can’t make out if it makes any actual sense, but the mere fact is undeniable: Intel’s chipsets are always sold to the mainboard manufacturers at a lower price than the officially set.
Take, for instance, i845 B0 stepping (with DDR SDRAM support), which officially costs $39 and should become $2 cheaper on April 1 (see this news story). From the very first shipment, the mainboard makers purchased this chipset at a lower price than the officially claimed $39, not to mention the present day situation. According to the recent reports, i845 B-Step chipset sells to the large mainboard makers at the price lower than $30 per chip (which used to be the border between the performance and low-cost chipsets). Of course! How could i845 B-Step sell at $39, when absolutely identical (and even better in some cases) SiS645 and P4X266A cost around $20, and the newest KT333 (just as an example here) – around $25. Even the magic word "Intel" will not help here.