Re: Intel Corp. (INTC) is planning to drop a "price bomb" on Aug. 26 in an effort to take back market share
If the server market were booming, Intel could (as in the past) sell desktop chips well below minimum profitable prices and make their money on servers.
Won't be happening this quarter, due to the server recession and the need to hold off AMD's new server offerings.
Intel won't be doing it with notebooks, either, not with AMD already picking up notebook market share at a stunning pace.
In past years, whenever AMD started doing well in a given segment, Intel would dump on that segment with the result that neither Intel nor AMD made much money in the segment. Then Intel would still make lots of money in the other segments and AMD would be screwed.
This time AMD is moving in on all segments at once, desktop, mobile, and workstation/sever, and Intel is cornered by its $6+ Billion per quarter costs.
AMD also now has lower infrastructure costs than Intel. Motherboards based on SiS and Via integrated chipsets have brought down the cost of an AMD Athlon or Duron Motherboard + video card + sound card + lan + modem + hardware DVD decoder (in the case of SiS) to less than $70, quantity 1, retail. In a micro ATX form factor. P4 has more stringent (and more expensive) case / power supply requirements than Athlon / Duron.
AMD has grabbed a hold of Intel's CPU family jewels, and is starting to squeeze. |
