Intel To Slash Prices Up To 60%

Chuan-kai Lin writes "According to Bloomberg, Intel will slash product prices by up to 60% in order to regain market share captured by AMD." From the article: "Intel said it will reduce prices of faster dual-core chips by about 15 percent, according to Alex Lin, a product marketing manager at Micro-Star, Taiwan's third-largest maker of motherboards, which connect electronic parts in computers ... Shares of Intel have fallen 33 percent since Otellini succeeded Craig Barrett in May last year. Advanced Micro's stock has gained 77 percent during the same period. Intel fell 31 cents to $17.08 at 12:06 p.m. New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market composite trading. Advanced Micro dropped $1.55, or 5.5 percent, to $26.45 on concerns that Intel will lower prices."

Cheaper Macs?

[irablum]

Does this mean even cheaper macs are forthcoming?

Ira

Some Other Suggestions For Intel

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, that's a start. No one wants your chips anymore, drop the prices.

Some other things for you Intel guys to try:

1) Start leveraging your compiler to inflate SPEC scores - special case and hardcode as many parts of SPEC as you can

2) Keep adding more cache so more synthetic benchmarks fit completely in high speed memory to inflate those SPEC scores

3) Dump truckloads and truckloads of cash on x86 hardware sites

4) Leverage Steve Jobs - there is no limit to how much he will lie about performance - you saved his ass when he got his annoying ass dumped by IBM, he's owes you guys big time

I could go on, but you get the picture.
Good luck guys!

Sounds Alright But...

[Valthan]

If they are doing it to capture the AMD market I think that it is going to fail because those of us on this side of the fence are here for more reasons than the "Hey, its cheaper... right?!" crowd. This will however be amazing if the price drop makes its way into the Macs, I have wanted one since they get their upgrade but I can't justify the cost...

Seems like it already happened

[Wylfing]

I do my own whiteboxing, and whiteboxing for all the friends and family around (Ubuntu only of course!), and I have always used AMD processors. This has been mainly a price decision. AMD chips and boards have always been much less expensive than Intel. However, I recently did my first Intel box. It was a success, and the price was more or less the same. I was pretty impressed, and I gave up a little of my AMD snobbishness.

costly gamble?

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems like Intel is killing two birds with one stone: getting rid of old stock and garnering market share. The latter is particularly significant because Intel's move forces the Pentium 4 and Pentium Ds into the budget segment while the Core 2 hits the mainstream and enthusiasts.

Of course, all at a cost.

But it must have shocked them to see their market share fall so much since AMD's 64 arose. Perhaps now it is AMD's turn to tremble as their Socket 940 brings little improvement and K8L is still on way beyond the horizon.

And the price of fish stays the same...

[Darklingza]

This is either fantastic news or the start of something truly terrible. For the last couple of years, I have encouraged everyone I know who was upgrading to go the AMD route for this very reason. Out of pure curiosity, I would really like to know where we would be if AMD wasnt on the scene, still dragging along at 2Ghz perhaps? Now my concern is that at some point the two companies decide to stop competing, Intel goes off and corners the ultra high-end server processor market, and AMD sticks to standard desktop processors, and we are all left we were before AMD came along. Then Cyrix will come back into the picture with an Athlon killer processor, now I dont know about you, but im not really interested in going through this whole cycle again. Im buying a Mac just in case. Disclaimer: This post may contain traces of nuts.

OK, that's nice

[La Camiseta]

But can they also slash the energy requirements and the heat produced by their CPUs? Seriously, between choosing an Intel CPU, or an AMD one that runs cooler and uses less energy, I'll go with the AMD.

Re:Cheaper Macs?

[shawn(at)fsu]

Thats probably why I like AMD. The whole underdog thing. I hope that as being the underdog the company is forced to make a superior product to stay alive and is probably willing to except a lower margin to gain market share. Thats my hope anyway.

Oh and plus I hate the Blue Man Group.

Re:Fantastic!

[jawtheshark]

A decent server for home? Boy... I didn't realise I needed Dual Xeons or Quad Opterons for that. Look, about a half year ago I just went insane and bought an AMD64 2800+ with 768Meg RAM for some spare change. Does my home server need this? Of course not! The P-I MMX 166MHz/256Meg RAM machine that it replaced just did everything just fine. The AMD64 is underclocked to 800MHz by now: I don't need more. The system runs OpenBSD:

[mako.sharks:/root] # uptime;top -n | grep 'Memory'
11:02PM up 66 days, 3:45, 4 users, load averages: 0.21, 0.16, 0.10
Memory: Real: 52M/193M act/tot Free: 547M Swap: 0K/1536M used/tot

This machine runs: ssh, sendmail, imap, dhcpd, ntpd, samba, pf, apache, X + Windowmaker, ftp-proxy and whatever I am forgetting right now.

My parents server is similar, well okay, it's full SCSI, but it's a P-III 800MHz. Same services (minus X). It also replaced a P-I 166MHz (non-MMX) with 128Meg RAM. That P-I didn't cope with exactly one thing I tried: IMAP. That was a bit too much. The P-III 800MHz? No problem at all. Oh, and this machine has way more users than the AMD64.

For home servers, one doesn't need much.... Sure, I have an AMD64, but it definately is overkill and I should have gone with something quieter.

Re:I have to wonder

[gerilart]

There is no way you going to be able to buy Conroe next month. Maybe for Xmas, when 25% of intel production is going to be Conroe. And the reatail price is going to higher due to inavailability.

Re:OK, that's nice

[gerilart]

Profve it. Show the link which Conroe has lower power requirement that AMD AM2 x2 3800, 35W. As far as I know Conroe TPD is 65W.

Processor lock-in more important anyway

[WillAffleckUW]

as an Intel shareholder, I'm glad to hear this. Now if Sony would just announce a price drop for the PS3 to get Blu-Ray lock-in, I might invest in them.

For the longest time, Intel shares have been based on the projection of 90+ percent market share - while Motorola has been knocked out now that Apple is using Intel chips, the rapid adoption of AMD by Dell and other suppliers has meant the market dominance model was in danger.

The geek in me, of course, loves AMD - I have one in my home laptop, and most of our lab's computers are dual core dual processor AMD Linux boxen with dual hard drives.

But looked at from the market perspective, this makes a lot of sense.

I predict, however, that this news will cause the non-techie investors to bail out of Intel - more cheap shares for techies like me, I guess.

Apple relationship implications

[geemon]

I wonder what announcements such as this will do to the relationship with Apple over the short and long term. When news like this is broadcast to a wide audience, people begin to question their vendors. "Hey, will I get a price break now on the products with Intel processors?"

Yet Apple's pricing model has always been pretty strict - normally you can count on paying the same price for a MacBook or MacBook Pro in another couple weeks or a month barring any product line updates. But this type of news may have more people asking why that needs to continue to be the case - if suddenly that Core Duo chip is x% cheaper, why can't my MacBook Pro drop in price a bit to reflect the component cost?