Chip Price Wars

From CDR Info:

Online reports already indicate that AMD is readying some rather substantial price cuts across its Socket AM2 line of processors. According to distributor prices obtained by the Inquirer site, Athlon 64 3000+, 3200+, 3500+, and 3800+ chips will drop to $89, $99, $109, and $139, respectively. If genuine, those figures will be up to twice as low as those in AMD's current price list, which shows prices of $189 and $290 for the 3500+ and 3800+. In addition, AMD's entire Socket AM2 lineup is expected to see prices slashed.

Summer is a great time of year to purchase a processor. It looks like the chip manufacturers are going to be seriously slashing the prices of some of their processors. This is of course in anticipation of the back to school computer shopping season as August is the most popular month for computer sales.

The upcoming introduction of Intel's Core Duo 2, also known by its code name "Conroe" has had a very strong showing in the limited benchmarks available. True, they've been limited to preproduction machines, under proud parent Intel's watchful eye, but they still look like they could be the best chips intel has made to date.

What does AMD do? Well, cut prices of course. Forget Sempron, they're making the excellent line up of older, but still capable Athlon 64 chips into entry level pricing. That's what AMD did when they introduced the Athlon 64's- they cut the prices on the Athlon XP line.

I think this is about time. With the single core Athlon 64 3800+ and the dual core Athlon X2 64 3800+ so close in price ($283 vs. $297), it was a true no brainer to buy the X2 with the dual cores. Now, this is changing again.

I'm still very enthusiastic for the dual core processors. However, for a budget user, a second machine for the youngsters or grandparents, this is a great deal at these lower prices. An Athlon 64 3500+ processor for $109 is a lot of performance on the cheap, and makes a purchase of a hobbled Celeron processor far less compelling in my mind.

It will be great to see now how much Intel cuts their prices on their entry level dual core processors: the 805 and 820. AMD's agressive price cuts will have to keep the pressure up on Intel. In the end, while Wall Street doesn't like the chip price wars, I like them very much, thank you. I'm sure you will too.

--Jonas

See how the Athlon 64 3000+ benchmarks against the Pentium D 805 here.