New Trends in Hardware

Friday Platform Trends: AMD Raises the Entry Level
Two Cores in Every Garage and a 64-Bit Chicken in Every Pot
Vince Freeman

AMD has been a thorn in Intel's side for years, but the thorn has felt more like a dagger in 2005. AMD almost seems to be goading the chip giant with each new, ever-faster CPU release; the for-enthusiasts-only 2.8GHz Athlon 64 FX-57 has set benchmark records in the single-core category, while the 2.4GHz dual-core Athlon 64 X2 4800+ absolutely annihilates its current Pentium D competition with today's single-threaded games and applications, and also wins a majority of multithreaded tests.

The only chink in AMD's armor has seemed to be its neglect of the entry-level or price-conscious desktop market. That's not surprising given the company's historic attachment to the performance sector, but nowadays there's an entry-level segment for dual- as well as single-core processors, so AMD needed to play catch-up on two fronts.

The price gap between Intel's and AMD's dual-core CPUs has been the subject of much discussion. At its May 31 introduction, the least expensive Athlon 64 X2, the 4200+, carried an OEM price of $537, with retail prices well over $600 -- about the same as Intel's Pentium D 840. That left both the Pentium D 830 and 820 models to undercut AMD. Meanwhile, Intel beat 64-bit pioneer AMD to the 64-bit punch in the shallow end of the single-core market, with a series of EM64T Celeron D chips that upstaged AMD's 32-bit Sempron line.

Reference:http://www.hardwarecentral.com/hardwarecentral/reports/5958/1/

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