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AMD Slashing Prices Still Not Enough?

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Mon Jul 24, 2006 07:27 AM
from the price-wars-mean-happy-consumers dept.
AMD Hardware
PeterN writes to tell us that after hearing the announcement that AMD was slashing prices on their processors by 47%, TG Daily looked a bit deeper and found that it still might not be enough. From the article: "For AMD's planned price drop for its dual-core processors to enable the company to regain its aggressive price/performance competitive position against Intel as it has promised, the company would have to reduce its existing Athlon 64 X2 and Athlon FX prices by between 38% and 56% for its various models, with cuts averaging about 51%. This estimate is based on a comprehensive price/performance review of Intel's soon-to-be-released Core 2 Extreme and Core 2 Duo processors, along with its existing Pentium D dual-core line, pitted against AMD's FX-62, FX-60, and Athlon 64 X2 processors in Tom's Hardware Guide tests."
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  • gamers beware. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Library Spoff (582122) on Monday July 24 2006, @07:33AM (#15768462) Journal
    If you're thinking of buying an AMD64 X2 for gaming and intend to put the chip in a motherboard with the Nvidia N4 chipset beware...
    Myself and several others have had problems with both Battlefield 2 and Source games (CS:S, day of defeat etc)

    Very annoying.

    Now i'll get lot's of replies from folks with this setup telling me otherwise....

    • Re:gamers beware. (Score:5, Informative)

      by thegamerformelyknown (868463) on Monday July 24 2006, @07:44AM (#15768479) Homepage
      I play CS:S with no problems at all, and I have a Nf4 and a AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+. However, I did have problems playing CS 1.6 online, the game would go too fast, then lag to "catch up". To fix this, I simply had to install the AMD drivers and all my problems were solved :) So have you installed the CPU drivers?
      [ Parent ]

      • Re:gamers beware. (Score:4, Informative)

        by ozbird (127571) on Monday July 24 2006, @08:33AM (#15768652)
        This sounds like the fix:
        AMD Dual-Core Optimizer [amd.com] - The AMD Dual-Core Optimizer can help improve some PC gaming video performance by compensating for those applications that bypass the Windows API for timing by directly using the RDTSC (Read Time Stamp Counter) instruction. Applications that rely on RDTSC do not benefit from the logic in the operating system to properly account for the affect of power management mechanisms on the rate at which a processor core's Time Stamp Counter (TSC) is incremented. The AMD Dual-Core Optimizer helps to correct the resulting video performance effects or other incorrect timing effects that these applications may experience on dual-core or multiple processor systems.
        Disabling Cool 'n' Quiet and/or power management may also work.
        (I've got an Athlon64 3500+; without CNQ it runs cooler and quieter than the Athlon XP it replaced, so I leave it turned off.)
        [ Parent ]

    • Two things to try (Score:3, Informative)

      by everphilski (877346)
      The first has been mentioned, the most recent Dual Core Processor Driver from AMD's web site [amd.com].

      The second (if that does not work) is to explicitly bind your game to a single core. Start the game and right away hit control-alt-delete. Select the game in the

  • But its better with most... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Roy van Rijn (919696) on Monday July 24 2006, @07:37AM (#15768468) Homepage
    Am I reading the article wrong..? It seems to me AMD is doing a pretty fine job, most lines are black, and only a few processors have a better Intel equivelent.

    Anyway, I was looking at a 4800 X2, and it seems its still the best option to buy atm, cheaper then the Intel (?).

    Still I think AMD has a group of active followers and Intel-haters, they won't stop buying those chips soon. And only in the very high end systems Intel is much cheaper, but thats not what most people will buy.

        • Re:But its better with most... (Score:4, Informative)

          by MrFlibbs (945469) on Monday July 24 2006, @08:25AM (#15768618)
          Your statement about AMD processors being "designed from scratch for the 64bit computing" is neither accurate nor meaningful. Internally, both AMD and Intel CPUs have used 64bit busses for a long time. (In fact, Intel just went to a 128-bit wide bus to the SIMD units to speed up SSE/2/3 instructions.) I have no idea at what point in their CPU design AMD decided to implement 64-bit registers and instructions, but I'm sure the CPU in which they debuted was based on an existing 32-bit design. Widening registers & ALUs and adding new instructions is non-trivial but pretty straightforward.

          Besides, even if one design adopted 64-bitness earlier in the process than the other, of what benefit is this? If this is advantageous, it should show up in improved performance on 64-bit benchmarks. Is this the case?

          [ Parent ]
          • Besides, even if one design adopted 64-bitness earlier in the process than the other, of what benefit is this? If this is advantageous, it should show up in improved performance on 64-bit benchmarks. Is this the case?

            As with all things of this type, it dep

  • Uhm... still no word on the AMD buying ATI? (Score:3, Informative)

    by maybeHere (804258) on Monday July 24 2006, @07:39AM (#15768471)
    I'm surprised there's nothing regarding that deal on Slashdot yet, as it appears to be as good as done.

  • 4%? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 24 2006, @07:40AM (#15768472)
    ... the announcement that AMD was slashing prices on their processors by 47% ...

    the company would have to reduce its existing Athlon 64 X2 and Athlon FX prices by between 38% and 56% for its various models, with cuts averaging about 51%

    OK, so they're saying that AMD missed the mark by 4%? And that this is worthy of writing an entire article about (a very short article by the way. Your welcome for the additional ad revenue :( Sheesh, welcome to journalism in the internet age.

    • Yeah. (Score:5, Funny)

      by Poromenos1 (830658) on Monday July 24 2006, @07:44AM (#15768480) Homepage
      For example, the 4200+ model would have to be priced below $213, but is indicated to sell for $225.

      I'd buy one if it was $213, but $225 is just too damn expensive!
      [ Parent ]

  • What about Opterons? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by pieterh (196118) <<pieter.hintjens> <at> <imatix.com>> on Monday July 24 2006, @07:43AM (#15768477) Homepage
    AMD have taken a large part of the market that Itanium was meant to take, the 64-bit multicore server market. It's a market that pays for commodity performance above all, and AMD seem to have become the dominant CPU supplier for high-end X86 systems like the HP ProLiant DL585. These are the kinds of server that run Wall Street.

        • Re:What about Opterons? (Score:3, Interesting)

          by gnasher719 (869701)
          'Uhm, Dell started shipping Opterons in May, precisely because high-end users were demanding them, and buying their servers from HP.'

          That's what I call bad timing. Three months with AMD, that means Intel is pissed off, and now they have the second fastest

  • Before and after (Score:5, Informative)

    by stupid_is (716292) on Monday July 24 2006, @07:45AM (#15768482) Homepage
    Before the cuts [amd.com]

    After the cuts [amd.com]

  • Off Topic: AMD PR Numbers (Score:4, Interesting)

    by TheRaven64 (641858) on Monday July 24 2006, @08:06AM (#15768557) Homepage Journal
    Back in the '90s, Cyrix introduced PR (Pentium Rating) numbers; their chips were slightly better clock-for-clock than Pentia (for integer ops, they weren't so good for floating point) and they marketed them based on the equivalent speed Pentium. When the Pentium II was released, these numbers started looking silly. A 233MHz Pentium II was a lot faster than a PR233 Cyrix part.

    The current crop of AMD parts are marketed with a similar scheme showing the speed of an equivalent Pentium 4. Intel have pretty much discontinued the P4 now, and an Athlon 4200 is definitely not twice the speed of a 2.1 GHz Core 2. Are these performance rating numbers going to make AMD look silly?

    • They are not "PR" numbers, they are model numbers. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by imsabbel (611519) on Monday July 24 2006, @08:22AM (#15768605)
      And certainly that 2.1GHZ conroe is sold as Core II 6600, which means intel is cheating, because its only as fast as an A64 5000.
      Do you get the point?
      Clockspeed is so yesterday. Just forget it.

      Its just a nametag. Live with it.
      [ Parent ]
    • Here's the thing about AMD's PR numbers for their Athlon CPU's: they are far more representative of true level of CPU performance than the old Cyrix PR numbers. If you note all the tests done by Tom's Hardware and Anandtech with the Athlon XP CPU some year

  • AMD CPU prices are not the whole story (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 24 2006, @08:14AM (#15768581)
    Have you checked Core 2 Duo compatible motherboard prices?

    They are around 200 euros. You can get a pretty good NForce4 board for 939 X2 for under 100 euros, and even AM2 boards are in 100-140 euro range.

    So total price, board+cpu, AMD still wins by a clear margin (price/performance), because intel chipsets are as overpriced as ever...

  • not the issue for many of us (Score:5, Insightful)

    by caudron (466327) on Monday July 24 2006, @08:39AM (#15768678) Homepage
    The real news for many of us about the AMD price cuts is extremely cheap CPU upgrades for our 939 socket systems. I have an AMD 3800+ and 3400+. Both are 939 and both mobos allow me to move up to one of the spiffy new dual core chips. With the new price cuts, I can upgrade my system to a dual core chip--each seperate core faster than my current single core CPU---for the price of a cheap-to-average video card. And there are a lot of AMD 939 users out there.

    That's the real news, not AMD missing the pricemark by 4%.

    Tom Caudron
    http://tom.digitalelite.com/ [digitalelite.com]

  • No reason to buy ANY new processors. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Lumpy (12016) on Monday July 24 2006, @08:53AM (#15768775) Homepage
    I just built a New media center PC for the living room. I am testing the XP based MediaPortal project that is turning out to be far superior to Microsoft's XPMedia Center 2005 and it's running on less than $150.oo in parts. Old Celeron 1.8 and horribly old ATX/AGP motherboard bought together from newegg for less than $50.00.

    There is no reason at all to buy a new generation processor outside of extreme gaming or science. Hell I still edit video on a 3 year old 2.8 P4 and it works great.

    The processor industry is suffering from stagnation. the new stuff is not fast enough to entice someone to throw away their current PC and buy the new performance stuff. and 64 bit has ZERO attraction to consumers and most people as there is no benefit or erason to switch to the 64 bit processors (unless you rtun linux and are a tinkerer.)

  • It's all a bit of history repeating (Score:3, Insightful)

    by MrShaggy (683273) on Monday July 24 2006, @09:49AM (#15769177) Homepage Journal
    See from what I can guess from it all is that I can remember when Intel was forced to drop its prices because of amd, and it was huge like that too. Not that Amd was any better, bu, If I am right, but they were at least half the price. Everybody went AMD, 90% for half the price, sounds good.
    • When Intel slashed the prices of the Pentium 4/D series, there was a lot of negative speculation. It turned out that they were just flushing their inventory before the Core 2 was released, since the Pentia were horribly uncompetitive next to the newer Cor

    • Re:Too much is never enough (Score:3, Insightful)

      by hey! (33014)
      When your processors are significantly slower than the opposition's, then no discount can be enough.

      Well, I dunno.

      That's probably true for the hobbyist market, but I'd guess the vast majority of processors go into machines that are never upgraded; therefor

    • Re:Too much is never enough (Score:3, Interesting)

      by pla (258480)
      My computer is now AMD, the previous was Intel. My next will probably be Intel by the looks of this.

      Agreed - I just thank Zeus that we finally have a good ol' fashioned price war again - Both Intel and AMD have, for a year or two, just kept pushing pric
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