AMD Slashes Processor Prices
AMD may claim that it isn’t worried by the plaudits being dished out to Intel’s new Core 2 Duo processor, but it certainly seems to be reacting having announced a dramatic reduction in the price of its desktop processor range.
AMD chips now sell for anything between $58 for the bottom of the range Sempron 2800, to $312 for the excellent Athlon 64 X2 5000+. Crucially, the top end of the market is where AMD is coming under pressure from Intel and the Athlon 64 X2 5000+ now costs over $500 less than the FX62.
AMD also cut the price of mobile processors. AMD Turion 64 mobile chips fell by as much as 26%, with its Model ML-44 down to $263.
The next leg of the Intel/AMD battle comes on Thursday when Intel unveils its Merom notebook processor, the next launch in its Core Duo line.
AMD won’t just be relying on price cutting to keep up the pressure. Quad-core processors are in the pipeline for 12 months time. “We have a new microarchitecture under development and the first substantiation of that will be the quad-core to be launched in mid 2007,” said Dirk Meyer, AMD’s president and chief operating officer.
Add comment July 24th, 2006