AMD positions Athlon as Intel Celeron killer

WE NOW HAVE SOME additional details of price changes AMD and Intel will make over the weekend and at the beginning of next week which indicate that the Celeron appears to be the clear target for the price cuts.

This marks the beginning of a new and, in our view bold, strategy for AMD as it prepares to introduce the Clawhammers as Athlon Extras or whatever it will call the processors at launch.

All these prices are distributor to reseller prices. As always, prices may differ from street prices and from OEM prices.

Boxed product refers to chips complete with fan, heatsink, and quite often a pretty good warranty. Trays are generally supplied to larger PC makers and system integrators, and generally don't carry those extended warranties.

We have already published prices of the higher speed Pentium 4s including the 3.06GHz Hyperthreading chip to be introduced next week. You can find full details on our roadmap page, here, as well as details of faster Celerons at 2.2GHz and above. These prices are OEM, rather than resellers prices. µ

European AMD Prices
Duron 1.2GHz, tray, $39
Duron 1.3GHz, tray, $41
Athlon XP1700+, boxed, $61
Athlon XP1700+, tray, $55
Athlon XP1800+, boxed, $78
Athlon XP1800+, tray, $72
Athlon XP1900+, tray, $80
Athlon XP2000+, boxed, $93
Athlon XP2000+, tray, $88
Athlon XP2100+, tray, $99
Athlon XP2200+, tray, $161

European Intel Prices
Celeron 1.7GHz, boxed, $61
Celeron 1.8GHz, boxed, $77
Celeron 2.0GHz, boxed, $93

P4 2.0GHz, 400MHz, boxed, $178
P4 2.4GHz, 533MHz, boxed, $214
P4 2.53GHz, 533MHz, boxed, $267

Other Intel Pricing Information
As we've noted here before, 533MHz Xeons will be introduced on the 17th of November, while there will be price cuts on Xeon 2.6GHz chips and above. On the 24th of November, Intel is expected to cut prices on some desktop motherboards.

While the 3.06GHz Pentium 4 is launched next week, most of the channel has already been told to expect volume shipments in December.

Any Pentium 4s with 256K of L2 cache are now end of line, and Intel will limit supply of these during the rest of November.

There is some variance on prices offered to resellers in North America, but authorised distributors typically offer Intel funded rebates which can vary from $3-$4 to as much as $14 for the high end Pentium 4s.

North American Pentium 4 Intel Prices (Boxed)
1.7GHz-256K $129
1.8GHz-256K $139
1.8AGHz-512K $150
2.0AGHz-512K $171
2.2GHz-512K $200
2.4GHz-512K $200
2.4BGHz-512K $200
2.5GHz-512K $250
2.53GHz-512K $250
2.6GHz-512K $315
2.66GHz-512K $315
2.80GHz-512K $410

Note that when prices, such as the 2.2GHz chip close on higher clock speeds such as happens above with the 2.4GHz, it means that the lower grade chip is just about to disappear off the price list and roadmap. µ