AMD and Intel at war - Details have leaked out on The Register about Intel's next couple rounds of price cuts. Intel plans to reduce the current price of Pentium 4 chips by up to 55% on August 26. Additionally, they are expected to introduce 1.9 GHz and 2.0 GHz Pentium 4 processors on that date. Further price reductions will occur on October 28. AMD just made some price reductions of their own, although they were not publicized very much. On top of the price cuts, Intel is accelerating the launch of their Brookdale chipset that will enable SDRAM to be used with the Pentium 4 platform. Brookdale should be available in two weeks. With the price cuts and SDRAM availability, the Pentium 4 will become much more attractive to many users, even if the use of SDRAM sacrifices 5-15% of performance compared to 6x more expensive RDRAM. Regarding the price war, ElectronicNews asks if the war is too much for AMD. AMD gained only .5% market share in the past quarter and they are now up to 22% market share, but their margins were down from over 40% to 37% in the process. AMD is aiming for 30% marketshare, but with such a small share gain in Q2 and Intel fiercely defending their P4 turf, they will have a tough go at it. The dark horse in the equation is Via's DDR chipset for the Pentium 4. If that comes out this year and outperforms Intel's i845 Brookdale, worries of DDR sales' impact on the P4 will be lessened, and AMD will have a tougher time gaining more marketshare against a P4 chip with SDRAM, DDR, and RDRAM support
www.chipgeek.com (http://www.chipgeek.com)

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Manu Narayan

Don't forget the server market, AMD will never break the Intel stranglehold.

Very true, though a lot of peolpe think they could do it. Six years ago no one thought AMD would have a 30% marketshare.

Though, I think the end of this year beginign of next could be a time when Intel could pull some lead again, given they are swithcing to .13 microns and 300mm waffers first.

That and intel has 7 plants. Where as AMD has two I believe. Intel can retool a plant while keeping 6 live, AMD loses half of their production...

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Manu Narayan

Agreed. I do like AMD I always have. Did you know they (AMD) originally worked on the x86 processor for intel. There silicon process is much faster than Intels the problem is Microsoft, Novell, various Linux shops only write to the Intel specs with 64 bit operating systems coming they won't change that.

Interesting, I did not know that.

I will be interested to see how AMDs next gne chips perform. The athlon/k6 were made by designs from a company that they aquired, and that is when INTEL/AMD became a REAL 'war.'

AMD now designing their own core, it will be interesting.

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Manu Narayan