Intel strikes back, AMD looking at serious pricecuts
Intel has launched their newest line of desktop processors yesterday, called the Core 2 Duo and the Core 2 Extreme. From what I’ve read, they won’t actually be available in stores until 2 weeks from now. But boy am I glad I waited a while before buying a new PC. Everyone is saying the same thing everywhere, these chips are awesome! It took Intel quite a while to work on new products to be able to take back the performance crown from AMD, but they’re doing it in a big way now.
The slower version of the new Intel chips, the Core 2 Duo, beats even the fastest AMD chip available right now in most cases, namely the Athlon FX-62 chip, while using considerably less power, producing less heat and costing half the price of the FX-62 chip! It’s almost unbelievable.
Do you know what that means? That means absolutely massive pricecuts for AMD chips in the very near future. Their currently high end Athlon FX-62 chip is going to have to be sold for about $400 to $450 if they even want to sell it 2 weeks from now (right now it costs about $1000). And you can expect the prices for the Ahtlon X2 chips to be even lower.
Apart from the benefits I mentioned earlier, namely less powerusage, less heat production while giving top performance, there are other cool advantages the new Intel chips have, one of them being their most excellent overclocking abilities.
I wrote before about the need for more power efficient hardware, and it is really good to see companies making a lot of effort these days to deliver products that perform faster while using less power. ATI and nVidia should be taking notes from Intel right now, and use Intel as an example of how to deliver great products, because their newest GPUs are exactly the opposite of what Intel has shown capable of with the new Core 2 Duo chips: Expensive powerhungry heat generators that don’t deliver that much performance per watt and per dollar.
For more details on the new Core 2 Duo chips, check out these excellent reviews on Tom’s Hardware and Anandtech.
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