AMD Slashing Prices Still Not Enough?

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."

Uhm... still no word on the AMD buying ATI?

[maybeHere]

I'm surprised there's nothing regarding that deal on Slashdot yet, as it appears to be as good as done.

Re:gamers beware.

[thegamerformelyknown]

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?

Before and after

[stupid_is]

Before the cuts [amd.com]

After the cuts [amd.com]

AMD CPU prices are not the whole story

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Re:But its better with most...

[MrFlibbs]

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?

Re:Off Topic: AMD PR Numbers

[nath_de]

There is a difference, as with AMD those numbers aren't supposed to be an equivalent to Pentium Mhz. They are meant as a comparison to the original Athlon. An Athlon 64 3000 is about three times the speed of a classic Athlon 1000. Comparing the speed of Athlon and Pentium CPUs is much to complicated to be put into one number. The numbers are good for me as an AMD user because I know which speed improvent I will gain when I replace my Athlon 64 3200 with an Athlon 64 X2 4800. I don't like Intels labeling as I simply don't know what to expect when replacing a 2,4 Ghz Pentium 4 with a 2,66 Ghz Core 2 Duo.

Re:gamers beware.

[ozbird]

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.)

Two things to try

[everphilski]

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 "processes" tab, right-click and select "set affinity" and check only 1 processor.

I too have an x2, nVidia video card and nVidia chipset. I had problems with Everquest2 until I installed the first, and regular Everquest until I did the second (every time you play). My wife has never had a problem with WoW.