Originally posted by: FishTankXHoly crap. AMD is gonna have one hella time with that kind of pricing...What I meant is that with Intel's agressive pricing AMD can no longer afford, in the near future, to maintain the price of the Athlon64's at this level.
I'm missing something here. Where is the aggressive Intel pricing? For years Intel has been cutting prices every ~3 months and in these price cuts, Intel has shifted all of its processors down one rung. The last cut was at the end of October, so the cut at the beginning of Feb is right at the 3 month mark. Lets look at the current and future prices:
CPU: Current price / Feb 2 price
3.4 GHz P4EE: NA / $999
3.2 GHz P4EE: $999 / NA
3.4 GHz: NA / $417
3.2 GHz: $417 / $278
3.0 GHz: $278 / $218
2.8 GHz: $218 / $178
2.6 GHz: $178 / NA
Looks like in each and every case, the prices dropped down one rung (or in other words, for the same price you get one bump up in CPU frequency) - just as Intel has been doing for years. Sure you could argue that Intel is also adding Prescott features to the CPU for free, but Intel has also done that in the past (Northwood and Williamette were only a dozen or so dollars apart - same goes with the 800 MHz and HT vs 533 MHz and no HT). So if Intel does exactly what they have been doing for years, how is it all of the sudden agressive pricing?