Intel will cut prices of its CPUs in the second half of the year in order to defend its market position, DigiTimes reported today citing unnmaed "PC makers" as its sources.Â
Intel has historically kept price cuts to a minimum. Over the last two years, however, that's changed, with some thanks due to the aggressive competition from AMD.
The most shocking of these price cuts was in October, when Intel announced the Cascade Lake-X CPUs with up to a 50% price cut immediately at launch. The move was thought to be an attempt to battle AMD's Ryzen 9 3950X, which brought 16-cores and 32-threads to the X570 platform for just $750.
One example was the Intel Core i9-10980XE, which was $979 compared to$1,999 for its previous-gen counterpart. Despite that, in our i9-10980XE review we weren't impressed with the refreshing of a dated platform.Â
It may be a bit much to hope for another price cut from Intel. But AMD is still gaining on Intel, which is a trend that's expected to continue.
Any sign of cheaper CPUs is  welcomed by those building a PC. Of course, buying a CPU is only a part of the expense. And although we might see price cuts there later in the year, DRAM and NAND prices are expected to rise this year, making it more attractive to purchase RAM and shop SSDs today.