Report: AMD CPU Price Drops Incoming; New FX-CPUs

News
By Niels Broekhuijsen
published

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.

Follow Niels Broekhuijsen @NBroekhuijsen. Follow us @tomshardware, on Facebook and on Google+.

Niels Broekhuijsen
Niels Broekhuijsen

Niels Broekhuijsen is a Contributing Writer for Tom's Hardware US. He reviews cases, water cooling and pc builds.

See more CPUs News
39 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Shneiky
    And here I was excited about Steamroller FX. Nope. Nothing new. Still the same Piledriver fiasco.
    Reply
  • tridon
    The 8370E is actually looking like a somewhat relevant cpu. Well... not for everyone of course, but I would reckon the lower tdp will make it more competitive than the 8350 is.
    Reply
  • ssdpro
    What is so fiasco about piledriver? I run a Z87 w/4770K system and a 990FX w/8350 system - while the AMD system can't compare with the processing power of the Intel, it isn't a disgrace or anything. If anything I think the AMD system is a bit more predicable and stable at the expense of everything, excluding PCIe, being about 20 percent slower.
    Reply
  • Kieran Warren
    Sadly AMD are struggling to compete in the high end CPU market these days. This can cause huge problems. Without any competition Intel would be able to raise their prices without a large performance boost meaning we get worse value for money. However they seem to be competing just fine in the lower-mid range CPUs and provide great bang for buck in almost all graphics card ranges.
    Reply
  • de5_Roy
    that's good news. both fx6350 and fx6300 will sell at very attractive prices. fx4320 looks like a bad buy compared to them. for a bit more budget, fx8320 also looks good considering intel only sells dual cores (core i3) desktop processors under the $170 range.
    Reply
  • icemunk
    AMD should just go full retard on the FX series.. just like put out a 8GHZ 500Watt TDP stock-liquid cooled chip with 16 cores or something completely nuts. Then on the other end they can focus on efficiency on their FM2 cores, and push for smaller form factors.
    Reply
  • photonboy
    AMD is dying a slow death.
    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.
    Reply
  • Shneiky
    Seeing how Steamroller performs in their APUs, creating a 3/4 module Piledriver FX on at least 20 nm (too bad it is not possible now), would let AMD at least come back into the heavy Integer performance and post some nice numbers along with few watts reduced TPD. The 7800/7850K's CPU performance is almost on par with a low-end I3 and it trades blows and even slightly edging the FX4300, despite it being 100 MHz clocked higher and having 125W TPD for CPU only.

    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.
    Reply
  • childofthekorn
    The reviews for the A10-7800 being more power efficient compared to the 7850k and then this coming out makes me curious, what is different about this chip that its capped at 95w.

    Although significant, but not a game changer, IMO.
    Reply
  • silverblue
    I'm not sure about the 125W 8370, unless the higher TDP means it can be overclocked better. Should AMD have created a higher clocked 8350 at 30% lower power consumption, that's not bad going considering.

    I'd still rather have Steamroller cores at those clock speeds, mind...
    Reply