AMD announces chips, drops prices
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posted 1:23am EST Tue Oct 17 2000
NEWS
AMD announced immediate availability of its 1.2GHz Athlon processor and 800MHz Duron processor just after midnight this morning. Computer manufacturers Hewlett-Packard, Compaq, and Gateway will be producing PCs based on the microprocessors. Both processors are produced on AMD's .18 micron process.
AMD has also reduced prices across both the Athlon and Duron processor lines. However, the listed prices are much higher than the actual prices that AMD's chips are available for at the comparison pricing site PriceWatch. We have put together a table with the listed AMD price, the lowest listed PriceWatch price, and the % difference between the two, called the "AMD Factor" below.
Chip AMD Price PriceWatch AMD Factor
Athlon 1.2GHz $612 $488
20%
Athlon 1.1GHz $460 $357 22%
Athlon 1.0GHz $350 $267 24%
Athlon 950MHz $282 $233 17%
Athlon 900MHz $215 $170 21%
Athlon 850MHz $193 $148 23%
Duron 800MHz $170 $104 39%
Duron 750MHz $112 $81 28%
Duron 700MHz $88 $61 31%
Read the press release at AMD. We also covered AMD's low prices in a news item yesterday.
ROB'S OPINION
It's interesting to note that the AMD factor is about 20% across the board for the Athlon and around 30% for the Duron. AMD has a habit of announcing prices at higher levels than the chips are actually available at. The only reasons I can think of are to keep Intel on its toes, or to allow retailers to charge higher prices for the chips to get higher margins. Services like PriceWatch (and our news pointing it out) tend to negate any such large margins.
The next move may go to Intel, if it decides to lower prices and follow suit. The 1GHz Pentium III is running at $664 currently. That will surely drop when Intel releases the Pentium 4 in late November. However, AMD is expected to release its own 1.33GHz Athlon around the same time. Intel and AMD may be aiming for Comdex on November 13-17 to release their next salvos.
AMD now leads Intel's fastest in-production chip by a whopping 200MHz. So far, I've only seen Tom's Hardware review the new AMD chips. The Gateway Select and Compaq Presario 7000 pages are also not updated, but I am writing this at 1:26 A.M. so I'd expect there to be lots more info out later today. |
