Will Athlon 64 price cuts go deeper than expected?
by Cyril Kowaliski — 6:10 PM on July 17, 2006

Last month, a leaked roadmap hinted that AMD was planning to slash prices pretty dramatically after the release of Intel's Core 2 Duo processor. Reduced prices on the roadmap ranged from $169 for the Athlon 64 X2 3800+ to $403 for the Athlon 64 X2 5000+. However, a new price list snagged by DailyTech shows even lower prices: $149 for the Athlon 64 X2 3800+ and a measly $282 for the X2 5000+. Side-by-side with Intel's official Core 2 pricing, the purported AMD list places the Athlon 64 X2 lineup like so:

Intel Core 2 Duo Price AMD Athlon 64 X2
E6700 (2.67GHz/4MB) $530
E6600 (2.40GHz/4MB) $316
$282 5000+ (2.6GHz/512KB)
E6400 (2.13GHz/2MB) $224 4600+ (2.4GHz/512KB)
E6300 (1.86GHz/2MB) $183
$175 4200+ (2.2GHz/512KB)
$149 3800+ (2.0GHz/512KB)

The price list also shows 65W "Energy Efficient" Athlon 64 X2 flavors sitting $28.75 above their regular counterparts on average, slightly lower than today's average of $33.2. As for the vanilla single-core Athlon 64 and Sempron lineups, the price list suggests they will both be brought under the $100 mark—except for the Athlon 64 3800+, which will apparently stick out at $109.

According to DailyTech, AMD will implement this pricing on July 24, three days before the official Core 2 Duo launch. If this information is genuine, it looks like AMD will be resorting to very aggressive pricing to compete with Conroe. The company could largely avoid direct confrontation with Intel's newcomer for a while, as well, since sub-$300 Core 2 desktop chips aren't expected to become available until some time in the fourth quarter of this year. That said, DailyTech claims these updated prices will stick "well into 2007," which could give Intel room to undercut AMD once again.

   
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