Huge Processor Price Cuts Coming - AMD and Intel

[ChemicalWarrior]

Okay, revising the thread a bit as I feel there's no need for two seperate threads on both Intel and AMD price cuts.

I've got semi official information on a Intel price cut coming on the 23rd and then there's a AMD price cut following very close on the 24th.

Intel prices look like the following:

dual core
P4D 960 3.6GHz / 800MHz 2x2MB $316
P4D 950 3.4GHz / 800MHz 2x2MB $224
P4D 945 3.4GHz / 800MHz 2x2MB $163
P4D 940 3.2GHz / 800MHz 2x2MB $183
P4D 930 3.0GHz / 800MHz 2x2MB $178
P4D 920 2.8GHz / 800MHz 2x2MB $178
P4D 915 2.8GHz / 800MHz 2x2MB $133
P4D 820 2.8GHz / 800MHz 2x1MB $113
P4D 805 2.66GHz / 533MHz 2x1MB $93

single core (6x1 = 65nm parts)
P4 661 3.6GHz / 800MHz 2MB $183
P4 651 3.4GHz / 800MHz 2MB $163
P4 641 3.2GHz / 800MHz 2MB $163
P4 631 3.0GHz / 800MHz 2MB $163
P4 541 3.2GHz / 800MHz 1MB $84
P4 531 3.0GHz / 800MHz 1MB $74
P4 524 3.06GHz / 533MHz 1MB $69

Celeron 356 3.33GHz / 533MHz 512KB $74
Celeron 352 3.2GHz / 533MHz 512KB $69

The AMD price cuts are a bit harder to get information about at this time. The only price I see showing up is about the upcoming A64 X2 3600+ which is suppose to debut at a rock bottom price of around $139. That's one heck of a deal. From what I gather the 3600+ is a 2Ghz part with only 256kb cache for each core, that's half the cache of its brother the 3800+.

Also, news on Core 2 pricing is expecting the top Conroe to be around $1K each and for the lowest end model to be around $190. I'm very curious on the lowest end model and what kind of performance its packing.

[LoPo]

Originally Posted by ChemicalWarrior

Lopo posted about it not to long ago, but I'm basically confirming it. HardOCP has a post basically saying that it is true.

HardOCP also said they'd have Conroe benchmark's soon of the retail processors.

You don't believe me, but if HardOCP says it's true, well then it must be true!

:P

[ChemicalWarrior]

I believed you, I'd heard something about AMD prices being cut big time, but those were quoting a 3800+ at around $180, which is so low that its hard to believe, and I figured the site you posted was just a extention of those. I'm still kinda doubting that $180 price though.

I also heard that AMD could be releasing a 3600+ X2 also.

[Cheese]

have to compete with my $110 3.5 ghz intel dual core somehow dont they? lol

[ChemicalWarrior]

Lol, I guess.

That 805 of yours is a great processor for the price.

AMD needs lower prices on the dual cores to compete with enthusiasts on lower budgets, which the arrival of Conroe soon this means AMD can drop prices and still maintain the budget crowd even if they lose some of the big spenders to Conroe.

I dont think AMD will be able to compete with the 805 price wise, and I dont think AMD will be able to match Conroe performance till we see K8L, which is unkown for arrival at this point.

Word was Q1 2007, then suddently it sparked up to Q1 2008, but many still claim its on schedule for Q1 2007. I dont know at this time though.

[LoPo]

Originally Posted by Cheese

have to compete with my $110 3.5 ghz intel dual core somehow dont they? lol

but it's Intel. :/

It's kinda like Coor's Light or any other domestic beer, it'll get you drunk...but in the end it doesn't taste as good and your hang over will be worse in the morning.

[dudio]

Maybe l0p0, but for some reason I still think
an Intel is a better bet (of course, I may not have
a clue what I'm talking about).

[Dynamic]

hijack comming ....


i havn't drank that many beers ... but usually when they dont have killians, i have coors light or bud light .... hmm

TIME TO DRINK!

[Dynamic]

btw, any links?

[ChemicalWarrior]

Originally Posted by dudio

Maybe l0p0, but for some reason I still think
an Intel is a better bet (of course, I may not have
a clue what I'm talking about).

Not really.

Since the launch of the Athlon 64 from AMD, Intel has been playing catch up (that's a good while, the A64 is actually getting old now). Intel totally shot themselves in the foot with the Netburst design (the P4). Netburst was suppose to go all the way up to 10Ghz! But Intel realized that they just coulnt do that (heck, they didnt even break 4Ghz). So they had to bring something up fast to meet AMD's far superior approach, enter Pentium M's desktop part: Conroe.

The Pentium M has been around for a good while now. Its actually based around very old technology (actually, the basics in CPUs today are extremely old in computer lifetime) in the P6 design (first Pentiums), though its called the P8 because it has indeed gone through many changes since then. The focus is more work per clock cycle rather than going all out for clocks. This works very well as right now its easier to throw more silicon at a problem than doing process noide races for more hertz.

The Conroe is a evolution of this design. It has very short and wide pipelines, so it does a lot of work per clock cycle, it also has a huge amount of cache (something that makes me a be worried about its lasting power though). The Conroe will be known as the Core 2 on the market, it'll be fast, very fast, I'm talking around a 25% increase over current A64's. It'll also run very cool and use little power, this is all part of the design goal.

Right now Intel is using their massive faberication capacity to price its processors extremely low. This is why they have $110 dual core processor in the 805, which is really the same basic chip as the highest end dual cores from Intel, this is why people like Cheese with just stock cooling have no issues OC'ing the processor to 3.5Ghz and run all day long. Its a great value, and its because Intel has to sell these till Conroe comes out, then these will leave the market pretty much, think of the $110 price as stock clearing. Its cheaper to sell them at extremely low prices than to keep them in storage at normal prices.

Conroe will be here in a matter of weeks now, possibly days.

K8L from AMD is basically a A64 on MASSIVE amounts of steriods. Its extremey beefy and will be a native quad core design. If you want some extreme tech specs here you go:


0. Native quad core
1. Hypertransport up to 5.2GT/s
2. Better coherency
3. Private L2, shared L3 cache that scales up.
4. Separate power planes and pstates for north bridge and CPU
5. 128b FPUs - see 14,15
6. 48b virtual/physical addressing and 1GB pages
7. Support for DDR2, eventually DDR3
8. Support for FBD1 and 2 eventually
9. I/O virtualization and nested page tables
10. Memory mirroring, data poisoning, HT retry protocol support
11. 32B instead of 16B ifetch
12. Indirect branch predictors
13. OOO load execution - similar to memory disambiguation
14. 2x 128b SSE units
15. 2x 128b SSE LDs/cycle
16. Several new instructions

Coprocessors:
media processing
JVM/CLR acceleration
TOE, XML or SSL processing

Basically, really fast. How much faster than Conroe? Unkown, but by then we'll see an updated version of Conroe and also quad core from Intel.

So yeah, a break down of the current consumer CPU market, the server one is REALLY fun! Some of the stuff from Sun is simply amazing to study like Ultra Sparc T1 from Sun which uses the Nigeria architecture, that chip packs in 8 cores each being able to handle 4 threads at once! Also, Intel says they'll have a 32 core processor by the time 2010 rolls in. So fun!

Dyn, for a link just go look at the HardOCP front page.