Report: AMD CPU Price Drops Incoming; New FX-CPUs
AMD might be dropping some of its CPU prices in a couple of weeks, which is unarguably a good thing.
Xbitlabs.com reports that AMD is dropping the prices of a handful of its FX-Series processors on September 1. Along with these price drops, AMD is also launching three new CPUs.
The new CPUs in question are the FX-8370, FX-8370E and FX-8320E. The first two are both eight-core chips and have a base frequency of 4.1 GHz, with a Boost frequency of 4.3 GHz. The E variant has a TDP of 95 W, while the standard version has a TDP of 125 W. Curiously, they are both listed at $189.
The FX-8320E features the same 3.5 GHz base frequency, and it has the same 4.0 GHz Boost frequency as its FX-8320 counterpart, as well as the same $139 price tag.
The price reductions appear to be AMD's effort to wiggle itself into a more competitive position. The FX-9590, which has cost around $800 in the past and was only available to OEMs at first, will have its retail price reduced from $299 to $215. The FX-9370 will drop in price to $199, placing it at the attractive sub-$200 mark. The ever so popular FX-8350 will lower in price by $20, dropping to $169. Note that these prices are for buying the CPUs in bulk, so retail prices may differ.
Chart Source: XBitLabs
Whether these price changes will help AMD's sales remains to be seen, though a little competition never hurt anybody.
These price changes and new CPUs are expected to be made official on September 1, so while the rumors might be believable, continue to treat them as rumors for now.
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The company keeps getting bailed out, but they just don't have the engineering and liquid assets to ensure their future.
Intel's squeezed them out of the high-end. Now Intel's efforts on mobile efficiency of the x86 CPU's is going to squeeze AMD out of the low end.
NVidia's got a lot of things going on as well to diversify.
I'd love AMD to do well however I'm not seeing a lot of hope for ten years down the road.
AMD has horrible floating point performance, so I am hoping they can at least bite the integer performance, sell some, gain some money, do some more R&D, get a new product out, so they can keep Intel prices from skyrocketing.
Although significant, but not a game changer, IMO.
I'd still rather have Steamroller cores at those clock speeds, mind...
Even if you (and i for that matter) like the 8350, they aren't going to produce more bulldozer chips if they aren't selling. Rumors are that Steamroller am3+ next year at 20nm. I'd prefer they hold off until excavator personally and just focus on making the chip more efficient.
They're good for day to day use, but the thermal envelope being as high as it is, the inefficiency per clock and high IPC as well as large power draw keeps as many from being sold. Once they get this crap worked out they'll cmoe out wtih a new desktop processor thats competitive. Jim Keller (the engineer who helped AMD pull intels reigns with the release of Athlon x64) is back and working on something brand new, I'm looking forward to seeing if its a competitive option or not.
As an example : "The new CPUs in question are the FX-8370, FX-8370E and FX-8320E. base frequency of 4.1 GHz, with a Boost frequency of 4.3 GHz"
How much of a difference does .2 GHz really does (usually we see a bigger gap between the base and boost (at least .5 GHz)
While I think the real deal is mostly the wattage (95 and 125)
But bottom line, when I buy a cpu, I just want it to work efficiently.
I'm on a 8120, and loving it, but power consumption is too much for my taste, especially overclocking (constant 4 GHz keeps all games fluid), so I disabled half of it to have an FX 4100. I thought about getting an 8320 for the efficiency improvement, but that would be too little improvement to make the expense worth it.
But now there's an 8320 at 95W stock! That is tempting, and if money allows, I might buy one. Not many people will be interested in these new processors, but there's a market for them. Steamroller would be better, but we do with what we have.
That's obvious, but they can't just put more floating point and halve the power because yes, can they?
Such a CPU would bankrupt them at that price. A return to a more traditional core setup may make more sense but you'd be talking four cores at the most.
There are many problems with Piledriver, but on the whole it's nowhere near as bad as Bulldozer. Slow cache, modular power gating and a lack of floating point resources still don't change the fact that the architecture still generally improves upon Phenom II for the same amount of power - my PII X3 710 is rated at 95W for a triple-core 2.6GHz CPU whereas a 6300 is clocked nearly 1GHz higher, has double the cores and still uses less power. Intel just improved their power usage at a much faster rate (and AMD clocks its parts too highly to help them keep up, at the risk of increasing power consumption far too much).