High-End AMD X2 Processor Prices Cut Almost in Half

knightmare · Post by **knightmare** » Tue Apr 10, 2007 10:10 am

AMD's restructuring is being accompanied by dramatic drops in the prices of its microprocessors, according to new official information released Monday.

In an update to its microprocessor pricing page, AMD announced high-end price cuts on the AMD Athlon 64 FX and Athlon 64 X2 microprocessors. The fastest Athlon 64 X2 processor, the 3.0-GHz 6000+, is now priced at $241, slightly more expensive than Intel's midrange E6400, a 2.13-GHz chip that sells for $224.

Most of the remaining chips on AMD's price list use the Socket AM2 or Socket F form factor, rather than the older Socket 939 interfaces.

AMD's flagship Athlon 64 X2 line, meanwhile, received significant cuts. The price of the 6000+ was cut by 48 percent, while the 5600+, now priced at $188, was lowered by 42 percent. The AMD 5400+ was removed from the price list, while the price of the 5200+ dropped from $232 to $178, a more modest 23 percent decrease. Cuts were made down to the slowest 3600+ part, which was reduced in price from $102 to $73.

AMD also trimmed the prices of its older Athlon 64 chips, which previously ranged from $102 for an AMD 4000+ part to $78 for the AMD Athlon 64 3200+. Today, those prices now range from $94 to $58. Slight cuts were made to the Sempron line as well.

AMD left the prices for its Turion chips unchanged.

While the processor prices generally refer to lots of 1,000 units, the lowered pricing generally trickles down to single-unit retail sales. The lower prices also affect the prices and configurations of PCs, although price adjustments can occur over a period of weeks.

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1 ... X1K0000532

YARDofSTUF · Post by **YARDofSTUF** » Tue Apr 10, 2007 10:21 am

Stock for stock the AMD X2 6000+ is better than the C2D 6400, But add in the heat of the AMD and the overclocking ability of the C2D and AMD isnt close.

Shagster · Post by **Shagster** » Tue Apr 10, 2007 12:05 pm

A bunch of the AMD only people are rejoicing and all buying 6000+'s on other forums.

Sava700 · Post by **Sava700** » Tue Apr 10, 2007 12:07 pm

well its piss poor I think since they are not dropping prices at all hardly on the FX chips...

YARDofSTUF · Post by **YARDofSTUF** » Tue Apr 10, 2007 12:14 pm

Sava700 wrote:well its piss poor I think since they are not dropping prices at all hardly on the FX chips...

Why would you care? The X2 6000+ is faster and cheaper.

Shagster · Post by **Shagster** » Tue Apr 10, 2007 12:22 pm

Maybe he's talking about the FX-72?

YARDofSTUF · Post by **YARDofSTUF** » Tue Apr 10, 2007 12:24 pm

Shagster wrote:Maybe he's talking about the FX-72?

6000+ is still 200mhz faster, same cache.

The FX-74 is the same ans teh X2 6000+, except it has lower heat output I think.

Sava700 · Post by **Sava700** » Tue Apr 10, 2007 2:24 pm

FX chips are better thats why... but ohh well I won't be building another machine for prob a year..that will put me about 6months after baby is born and for me to figure if I have enough time to fool with it

YARDofSTUF · Post by **YARDofSTUF** » Tue Apr 10, 2007 2:29 pm

FX arent much better, only in heat, otherwise they are the same for this generation.

Shagster · Post by **Shagster** » Tue Apr 10, 2007 8:31 pm

YARDofSTUF wrote:6000+ is still 200mhz faster, same cache.

The FX-74 is the same ans teh X2 6000+, except it has lower heat output I think.

Oh, never really followed it.

Northwood <long pause> core 2 duo

Shagster · Post by **Shagster** » Fri Apr 13, 2007 9:40 am

I was reading a review on the 5600+ and it compared it to pretty much every X2 and all the core 2 duo's.

It's a pretty good indicator that AMD is not far behind at all.

This could become an interesting competition come summer time when newer cpu's come out.

It will be like the near endless debate over the Geforce 7x000 series and the Radeon 1x00 series

I haven't had an AMD rig since the XP days, I wouldn't mind an excuse to get one again.

YARDofSTUF · Post by **YARDofSTUF** » Fri Apr 13, 2007 9:44 am

Ya, AMD isnt far behind. There are places where the 6000+ X2 can hang with and beat out the E6600, But with price, motherboard selection, and overclocking factored in, the E6600 comes out on top, as long as you plan to OC.

Shagster · Post by **Shagster** » Fri Apr 13, 2007 9:51 am

AMD Athlon 64 FX (Agena), previously known as Altair, is expected to be released in Q3 on a 65nm process. Agena is the desktop equivalent of Barcelona, being a Quad Core K8L CPU. Agena will be a HyperTransport 3.0 CPU running on Socket F+.

AMD Opteron (Barcelona) Quad Core CPU is expected to be released in July on a 65nm process. Barcelona is expected to be the first K8L based CPU, featuring 4 cores. Each core will feature 64KB - 32KB Instruction, 32KB Data - of L1 (down from 128KB in the K8 architecture), 512KB of L2 cache per core and - in it's Opteron form, 2MB of shared L3 cache. K8L will also feature AMD's DICE (Dynamic Independent Core Engagement) power saving technology which enables each core to alter it's own p-state (Power state) right down to putting a core in a full Halt condition and will introduce HyperTransport 3. Hypertransport 3 will introduce a number of improvements. Firstly, the HT speed will be increased to 2.6Ghz, which will allow for 5.2GT/s, compared with a maximum of 1.4Ghz in HT2 (1Ghz in the K8 architecture). Secondly HT3 will introduce 'Un Ganging', which will allow either one 16-bit link or two 8-bit links to be created on the fly. This will be particularly useful with multi-socket Opteron servers as it can allow for single memory hop access to memory which would previously have taken two hops. Additionally the K8L core will have an enhanced instruction set, Indirect branch prediction, 32-byte prefetch (compared with 16 in the K8 architecture), 48-bit addressing with 1GB pages, better cache coherency, I/O virtualisation, Memory mirroring, data poisoning and HT retry protocol support, and 2x128-bit SSE units (compared with 2x64-bit units in K8) featuring support for single cycle 128-bit instructions. Altair will interface to DDR2 memory, with the K8L core featuring support for FBD and, in a future memory controller revision, DDR3 and FBD2 support. The initial members of the family will be:

Opteron 2258HE - Quad Core, 68W
Opteron 1266 - Dual Core, 95W
Opteron 1268SE - Dual Core, 120W
Opteron 1270SE - Dual Core, 120W

AMD Athlon 64 X2 (Kuma), previously known as Antares, is expected to be released in Late Q3. Kuma is the Dual Core, Socket AM2+ version of Agena, featuring HT3 support and 1MB (possibly 2MB) of L3 cache.

...are all being released prior to any new intel chip (except for the other version of the other kentfields).

What's with the small cache sizes? Intel is pushing for 4 to 8 now and even up to 16 in their server chips.

YARDofSTUF · Post by **YARDofSTUF** » Fri Apr 13, 2007 10:00 am

Cache works differently for AMD and Intel chips, doubling the cache on an Intel chip usually means an increased performance, but not for AMD.

Shagster · Post by **Shagster** » Fri Apr 13, 2007 10:27 am

I'll have to research why

YARDofSTUF · Post by **YARDofSTUF** » Fri Apr 13, 2007 10:47 am

Shagster wrote:I'll have to research why

Shagster · Post by **Shagster** » Fri Apr 13, 2007 1:36 pm

I think I found out why...

All data on traditional cpu's occupies its base level cache and all levels above it. So one piece of data is occupying two levels of memory on a single cpu.

Apparantly AMD cpu's don't let that happen. So L1 data can only be found in L1 and L2 can only be found in L2 and so on (server chips).

So the L2 wouldn't need to be as large. AMD also has larger L1's at the moment than Intel does. 4x larger.

Can anyone confirm that?

YARDofSTUF · Post by **YARDofSTUF** » Fri Apr 13, 2007 1:43 pm

No but I give you credit for finding it, nice job!

Shagster · Post by **Shagster** » Fri Apr 13, 2007 1:46 pm

They should make a Lporn cache

Possibly help their sales.

Rivas · Post by **Rivas** » Fri Apr 13, 2007 6:35 pm

Shagster wrote:They should make a Lporn cache

Possibly help their sales.

illestdynasty · Post by **illestdynasty** » Sat Apr 14, 2007 6:35 pm

Sava700 wrote:well its piss poor I think since they are not dropping prices at all hardly on the FX chips...

you want FX performance? Buy an opteron and overclock it, FX and opterons are the same cores..

azichek · Post by **azichek** » Mon Apr 16, 2007 1:52 pm

Go to this link. You'll see just how good the stock fx-74 or 72 is. Esp. for the price.

http://www23.tomshardware.com/cpu.html? ... &chart=188

YARDofSTUF · Post by **YARDofSTUF** » Mon Apr 16, 2007 2:09 pm

azichek wrote:Go to this link. You'll see just how good the stock fx-74 or 72 is. Esp. for the price.

http://www23.tomshardware.com/cpu.html? ... &chart=188

Theres no comparision to be made between the FX74 and the 6000+ or an opteron, and its toms hardware.

azichek · Post by **azichek** » Mon Apr 16, 2007 2:24 pm

call me a noob, but what's wrong with toms hardware?

YARDofSTUF · Post by **YARDofSTUF** » Mon Apr 16, 2007 2:26 pm

Ok I see the review for the 6000+ there, but are they comparing 1 74 to teh 6000+ or 2 running that 4x4 stuff?

I find it odd that one 74 would do so well.

YARDofSTUF · Post by **YARDofSTUF** » Mon Apr 16, 2007 2:27 pm

azichek wrote:call me a noob, but what's wrong with toms hardware?

The sites reputation. They've tried to chagne it, but Anandtech, GamePC, HardOCP and others have always been fair, so I trust them more.

Shagster · Post by **Shagster** » Mon Apr 16, 2007 11:08 pm

YARDofSTUF wrote:Ok I see the review for the 6000+ there, but are they comparing 1 74 to teh 6000+ or 2 running that 4x4 stuff?

I find it odd that one 74 would do so well.

The test says it was done on a NF6 board. Assuming they didn't run a single cpu on a dual socket board (is that even possible?) it really isn't very impressive at all.

*edit* Tom's hardware screwed their reputation when they became excessively bias towards intel many years ago.

YARDofSTUF · Post by **YARDofSTUF** » Mon Apr 16, 2007 11:21 pm

Generally yeah you can run 1 cpu on a dually board, but I don't know about these 4x4 boards.

azichek · Post by **azichek** » Tue Apr 17, 2007 4:00 am

You are able to run one cpu on the AMD dually board but not the Intel. the Intel's sell as a package for $970. You can buy the fx's for $329 each. they are a lot cheaper for just barley being behind.

Shagster · Post by **Shagster** » Tue Apr 17, 2007 8:30 am

What you just said makes no sense to me

YARDofSTUF · Post by **YARDofSTUF** » Tue Apr 17, 2007 11:42 am

azichek wrote:You are able to run one cpu on the AMD dually board but not the Intel. the Intel's sell as a package for $970. You can buy the fx's for $329 each. they are a lot cheaper for just barley being behind.

The intel chip it compared to is a single chip.

illestdynasty · Post by **illestdynasty** » Tue Apr 17, 2007 10:50 pm

....still not seeing a comparison to an opteron, but you can rely on benchies all you want, I'm going by what I know.

YARDofSTUF · Post by **YARDofSTUF** » Tue Apr 17, 2007 11:18 pm

1 - FX74 - $429
mobo - $299

Intel 6600 - $308
mobo - $104

Going the FX74 way is too expensive.

YARDofSTUF · Post by **YARDofSTUF** » Wed Apr 18, 2007 4:52 pm

More news, after april 22nd the E6600 should be $224

Shagster · Post by **Shagster** » Wed Apr 18, 2007 5:36 pm

**** it and save for penryn.

YARDofSTUF · Post by **YARDofSTUF** » Wed Apr 18, 2007 5:46 pm

Shagster wrote:**** it and save for penryn.

**** that save for Nehalem!