Analysis: Dissecting the pricing trend
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Now we can really get an almost full comparison to AMD and Intel on the higher end, and it appears like the intersection between the two continues to move to the right, giving AMD a better average performance-per-dollar ratio for a longer scale than we've previously seen.
Intel remains the hardware maker to offer the highest performance with the most value, but for anything that offers up to 1.8 times the performance of a Pentium 4 520, AMD looks to be the better bet.
The new pricing levels for the high-end FX processors helped AMD's correlation, as it set a new all-time high for us, reaching 0.973, a nearly perfect relationship between price and performance.
Intel also saw an increase in correlation, after it dipped over the past two weeks. This week it logged a correlation of 0.619, a 1.9% jump from last Friday's 0.607.
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With the highly overpriced Extreme Editions and other Pentium processors, Intel's overall trendline is of course inflated on the low end. However, when we break it down, we see that the Core 2 processors still take their dominance over AMD, though at AMD's very high end, it touches the Core 2 curve, the first time we've seen it do so. If AMD's processor prices drop yet again next week, we could see some real pressure on Intel.
Correlation for these curves are 0.777 for the Pentium processors, down marginally from last week, and 0.927 for the Core 2 side, up from last week's 0.915.
As the final price/performance article for 2006, we have included in the following pages individual graphs for every processor, with our recorded average e-tail prices over the past 13 weeks. Since we only have two weeks of pricing data for the FX-70, 72, and 74, however, they are not included in the following set of graphs.
