Intel Corporation set the date of its 26th October's price reduction quite long ago and there are no surprises that next week Intel will cut down the pricing of some of its processors truly significantly. However, not only Intel, as unofficial sources reveal, will change the pricing of its CPUs early next week. As this Chinese web-site reported, AMD is very likely to follow Intel with its price-cut move. The Sunnyvale, California-based company will adjust the pricing of its higher-end AMD Athlon XP chips, such as AMD Athlon XP 3200+, AMD Athlon XP 3000+, AMD Athlon XP 2800+ and maybe some others. Since lower-end AMD Athlon XP chips' pricing is in step with comparable Intel Celeron processors value, I would not expect them to fall in pricing as well, because Intel sources have not reported about Celeron price reductions in late October.
Intel Pentium 4 3.20GHz processor is anticipated to have its price cut by about 35%, from $637 to $417. The values of the Pentium 4 3.06GHz and Pentium 4 3.00GHz processors will also loose about 35% and will be at $262 and $278 points respectively. At the same time, Intel Pentium 4 2.80GHz will cost $218 after the 26th of October, a 22% less than the present price cost of $278. There is no information about AMD's price-cuts, but given that its Athlon 64 3200+ now competes with the Pentium 4 3.20GHz, there is no point to keep the pricing of the Athlon XP 3200+ up, but to set it fight Intel's Pentium 4 3.00GHz and 2.80GHz at well below $400. In general, Athlon XP 3200+ processor at its $464 price-point does not provide enough benefits for customers, who may prefer the cheaper – $417 – AMD Athlon 64 3200+ that has higher performance in a lot of applications as well as 64-bit extensions.
News source: X-bit labs
