AMD plays catch up with price drop

AMD hopes to play catch-up with rival Intel.

As AMD announced price reductions on its Athlon X2, Phenom X3 and Phenom X4 desktop CPUs, analysts have speculated on whether it is too little, too late in its catch-up game with Intel.

In the Phenom X4 range, the price cuts have been as much as 30 per cent. Similarly proportioned price cuts affected the Phenom X3 and Athlon X2 range.

With these price reductions AMD said it has taken steps to significantly enhance the price and performance of its CPU portfolio. The goal is to make high-performance AMD Phenom quad-core and triple-core processors accessible to a wider audience of mainstream PC users, explained PR manager Julia Clark.

“The cuts are designed to bring more value to consumers and our channel partners on a price and performance level. We strive to deliver a platform that provides the optimal choice between the right CPU and GPU balance,” said Clark.

But Eszter Morvay, IDC’s senior research analyst in its PC research group, claimed that AMD has not been striving hard enough.

“This is a response to Intel cutting quad-core prices, which won a bigger share of the quad-core desktop market for Intel,” she said.

This initiative probably will not be significant for the balance of power in the market, but will at least ensure greater overall uptake of quad-core technology in the desktop PC sector, according to Morvay. The problem is, she added, all the action is in the notebook sector.

Gamers and other high-performance PC enthusiasts might be excited by the recent addition of the SB 750 Southbridge to the AMD 790 series of chipsets, meaning that users can enjoy an enhanced overclocking experience with AMD’s Advanced Clock Calibration (ACC) capabilities.

Meanwhile, an AMD roadmap confirms that quad-core Phenom processors based on the Deneb core are due to be released by the vendor or to the market on 8 January 2009.