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AMD Price Drop Coming?

R

Roman79

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Oct 2, 2000
Messages
1,393
I was just checking out pricing on some of the hex-core Phenoms this evening at ncix.com (Canada), and I noticed that they're offering "free shipping for your entire order" when you buy many of the AMD cpus they have listed.

I don't want to start a rumor of anything, but in my many years shopping at ncix.com, this almost always means that a price drop is coming.

Has there been an announcement that I missed?
 
I thought they had a hard time keeping them in stock and there was a shortage just weeks ago.
Then again, this may be the left hook to nVidias GTX460. I know one is a GPU and one is CPU but they could be doing something different now that they have a CPU/GPU company.
 
i havent seen anything about a price drop.....but who knows.....I would assume one would come in 6-10 months right before bulldozer drops(assuming next years release date is still good), to keep interest in the Phenom II series until then...or maybe Fusion from AMD is on the horizon
 
we dont even know if there will be one....the OP stated that in the past when free shipping deals have occured with NCIX they have foreshadowed a price drop from whatever is offering them.....none have been announced that I know of...
 
I don't think we have any big AMD price drop coming at all, if anything they will lower the 5850 price to respond to GTX 460.
 
Well, Intel did say they'll be lowering prices in Q3, maybe AMD is just trying to get ahead before that happens?
 
most likely there will be a price drop.. the reason most places start offloading processors with free shipping is that they need to offload their current inventory to repurchase more product at a lower whole sale price.. so it is possible they are getting ready for a price drop in Q3..
 
To me, their prices are pretty good right now, but with another price drop, AMD could see more sales in their older products to try to clear space for the newer stuff.

I don't plan on building another rig for another 6-8 months as my Intel Core 2 Quad is serving me fine, but for my next build, budget AMD quads is definitely something I will consider.
 
Maybe they are making place for 1055T with 95W and want to sell some more before 1035 and 1075 arrive ?
 
Would be interesting. I am close to pulling the trigger on a 955 phenom, 4 gig DDR1600, asus mobo combo for $335.
 
that sounds right :)

110 for CPU
110 or so for DDR3 1600
leaving 115 or so for a decent mobo
 
anyhow, i hope there is one soon......the more reason to push my dad to get a 1055t or maybe a 1090t(he does alot of home video editing, and his 9850 is showing its age.......though it will be tough to get him to join the [H]orde.....he is mainly WCG)
 
werent the 95 watt 1055ts supposed to be available already? i wish i had one of those for lower heat output and power consumption compared to mine. either way a price drop would be nice from amd.
 
i would have expected a response to Intel's i5 760............
 
Maybe it isn't a $$ drop, but a bump? 6x2.8--->3.0 and 6x3.2---->3.4(6)... AMD has very few options to stay very competitive in a $$ worthy sku. The 6 core P2's have done well, and that was noticed by some Intel $$ shifting (isn't it fun to play with a 2000 lbs bear? Not!)
I do not see AMD abandoning their inroads quite yet. They will launch a salvo of binned parts before they have to strip prices to the bone while waiting for BullDozer to arrive.
If we see a rash of price drops and no higher clocked sku's, yikes, yikes!
Either way AMD brass is being hit on two fronts. Lets see what they have up their sleeve.
 
R3MF said:
i would have expected a response to Intel's i5 760............
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the question is.. is there really a need to respond to what will be a dead socket by the end of this year? honestly no i dont think they need to have anything to respond to it.. anyone who's still buying LGA-1156 obviously doesnt know its being scrapped at the end of the year while AM3 will still be going strong well into the middle of 2011 by the time a release date for bulldozer is even announced.. now do i think we will see some more X6's coming out down the road? hell yeah and im sure we will see something like the x4 965 which is just an overclocked version of the chip below it.. so theres a possibility we may see a 3.2 or 3.4ghz x6 released in the near future.. now what im really hoping is that they are working on a new stepping for the x6.. possibly a 95w 1055T or lower power draw on the 1090T like the C3 stepping for the 955 even though it was still rated at 125w but really wasnt a 125w TDP chip.. at this point we can only hope.. but the 1090T is still at the top of my to buy list in the next 2-3 weeks so hopefully something is announced before i drop the cash on the 1090T..
 
In late August, Intel will be dropping the price of their I7 950 to $294. You would think that AMD will either drop the price of their 1090T by a small amount or release a new X6 processor. I hope AMD surprise us all and releases an X8 as an interim solution until Bulldozer arrives in Q2/Q3 2011.
 
Kreed said:
In late August, Intel will be dropping the price of their I7 950 to $294. You would think that AMD will either drop the price of their 1090T by a small amount or release a new X6 processor. I hope AMD surprise us all and releases an X8 as an interim solution until Bulldozer arrives in Q2/Q3 2011.
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I'd love to see an X8 CPU. If they released one, I would think the performance might compete with the six core i7. I would think if they released one, it would probably force the six core cpus down in price. I don't like to expect big things though. I think we'll just see a price drop at best.
 
Can they make an 8 core on this socket? I understood that 6 core was all we would ever see.
 
Aaron11 said:
Bulldozer was supposed to be on AM3 socket. I think you'd probably just need a bios update.
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From what I read, the first "Zambezi" Bulldozers will be AM3 compatible, but there's talk of a "Fusion" 8-core that will be a whole new socket. All of that is speculation, as far as I know.
 
Aaron11 said:
Bulldozer was supposed to be on AM3 socket. I think you'd probably just need a bios update.
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Two things. First we shall see what exactly bulldozer counts as a core because they are blurring the lines a little. I mean 2 threads on 1 module with a reasonable amount of shared resources between the threads. To me this is more than HT but less than full independent cores. I could be wrong.

The second is they will absolutely need more than 2 channel ram to compete against Intel's 4 channel systems especially for 8 threaded processors.
 
drescherjm said:
Two things. First we shall see what exactly bulldozer counts as a core because they are blurring the lines a little. I mean 2 threads on 1 module with a reasonable amount of shared resources between the threads. To me this is more than HT but less than full independent cores. I could be wrong.

The second is they will absolutely need more than 2 channel ram to compete against Intel's 4 channel systems especially for 8 threaded processors.
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its completely different from hyperthreading.. using 1 core but splitting the resources between 2 parts per core.. unlike hyperthreading where each core is split into 2 threads sharing the same resources between that single core.. so while yes its technically a quad core..its a quad core with the hardware resources of 8 cores.. thus should be exactly double the performance unlike hyperthreading which is about 60% added performance.. but who really knows until we see one out in the wild..
 
so while yes its technically a quad core..its a quad core with the hardware resources of 8 cores
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I do not believe that it is 2 times the resources. It's definitely more than 1 times though. Although when I think of it, for HT to work it on i7 it had to have more resources than what was needed for a single thread. It could not rely on having a very long pipeline with lost of stalls like the P4 did.
 
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Why cant AMD come out with a FASTER processor?

Rather than coming out with a 74 core CPU thats still slower than a quad core Intel, how about a quad core that can keep up with an i7?

Im a budget gamer so Im a huge fan of AMD for their extreme value. Their Athlon II line is the best bunch of processors on the market dollar for dollar but it would be nice for AMD to come out with something that can actually go toe to toe with the i7 line.
 
Why cant AMD come out with a FASTER processor
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Its not easy and Intel does not have a bad design now like it did with P4.

I believe the biggest problem for AMD and Intel is power usage. I believe both manufacturers could easily produce 4GHz 200W chips. I do not think the market is ready for that even though some video cards use this much power.

AMD is also 12 to 18 months behind Intel in process nodes. Intel has had 32nm chips for 4+ months now, AMD will not have this till at least 2Q 2011.
 
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I don't mean faster clocks, just faster overall. You've got i7's at 2.8 GHz running rings around 3.4 GHz Phenoms in most benchmarks. Hopefully Bulldozer will change that or at least catch up.
 
sirmonkey1985 said:
its completely different from hyperthreading.. using 1 core but splitting the resources between 2 parts per core.. unlike hyperthreading where each core is split into 2 threads sharing the same resources between that single core.. so while yes its technically a quad core..its a quad core with the hardware resources of 8 cores.. thus should be exactly double the performance unlike hyperthreading which is about 60% added performance.. but who really knows until we see one out in the wild..
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I'm pretty sure that doubling performance will only happen only in certain types of operations in others early eastimate suggest it might be at Phenom II levels.

Gym Rat said:
Why cant AMD come out with a FASTER processor?

Rather than coming out with a 74 core CPU thats still slower than a quad core Intel, how about a quad core that can keep up with an i7?

Im a budget gamer so Im a huge fan of AMD for their extreme value. Their Athlon II line is the best bunch of processors on the market dollar for dollar but it would be nice for AMD to come out with something that can actually go toe to toe with the i7 line.
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It would be awesome if they could match penryn clock for clock with bulldozer. I often compare time required to finish various calculations in boinc distributed computing with few team mates who have q9550 and the X6 comes on top only through brutal power of 6 cores because in performance per thread i'm always losing.

Also i started to question if they are such uber value I think i'd rather have i3 530 then X4 630.
X4 has minimal cache and tops at around 3,7 Ghz which means 4x3,7= 14,8 (yeah i know it doesn't work that way)
i3 530 typically goes to 2x4,4 = so we have 8,8 so on paper only 60% of amd power but then i3 has more cache, has better per clock performance and stacks HT on top of that. So the result isn't as clear cut as a lot of people think with "more cores" is better even in a heavily multithreaded game like GTA IV:

1277482943gry_gta4.png

1277482943gry_lostplanet.png


Imho the only good value stuff amd has are those core unlocked cpus and maybe X6 if you live in USA and can get some of those combo deals.*

*as long as we speak from [H] perspective because at stock speeds amd is quite competitive.
 
With AMD, any price drop usually doesn't change the sales all that much. AMD is known for being budget-friendly, but there's no way they can drastically reduce prices like Intel has.
 
Aaron11 said:
Bulldozer was supposed to be on AM3 socket. I think you'd probably just need a bios update.
Click to expand...

Anyone confirm that?
I also dont think moving from 6 real cores to 8 hypothetical cores is better.
Im still holding off an upgrade at this point and want to see what Intel and AMD have instore but that looks more like late next year.
 
Gym Rat said:
I don't mean faster clocks, just faster overall. You've got i7's at 2.8 GHz running rings around 3.4 GHz Phenoms in most benchmarks. Hopefully Bulldozer will change that or at least catch up.
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Increasing performance usually requires a combination of faster clocks, faster transistors / node shrink, more cores, more energy efficient transistors, better design. None of these options are easy and its also harder for AMD versus Intel since Intel has more $ to research and develop improvements to these. AMD needs competent partners to share the development cost. IBM has helped AMD several times (for a price) with SOI but I am not sure they help as much now. Although they do make 5 GHz+ dual/quad core processors using 65nm SOI process but these things cost $3000+ each.
 
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