Intel's Core 2 Extreme & Core 2 Duo: The Empire Strikes Back

New Pricing

As you will soon see, Intel's new Core 2 lineup has basically made all previous Intel processors worthless. The performance of the new Core 2 CPUs is so much greater, with much lower power consumption, that owners of NetBurst based processors may want to dust off the old drill bits and make some neat looking keychains.

Intel also realizes that its new Core 2 line will make its older Pentium D and Pentium Extreme Edition processors seem a bit homely, and thus it will significantly reduce the pricing on some of the CPUs by the end of this month to help spruce them up a bit.

Intel's new pricing, effective starting July 23rd, is listed below:

The table above only showcases the NetBurst CPUs that are actually cheaper than their Core 2 counterparts; there are a number that are priced equal to Core 2 options, but you'll want to stay away from those (more blatant foreshadowing).

Unfortunately AMD won't have an architectural update of the Athlon 64 X2 until sometime in 2007 or 2008, thus its only response to Intel's Core 2 lineup today is to also reduce pricing. Shortly before today's launch AMD informed us that more aggressive price cuts for the Athlon 64 X2 line were coming in July, but we couldn't get any more specific information. The best numbers we've got are those that were leaked shortly after Computex, which may end up being higher than what AMD is now thinking of doing:

In order to keep prices competitive, AMD is also killing off its Athlon 64 X2s with a 1MB L2 cache. By only shipping 512KB parts (except for the limited quantities of FX processors that are sold), AMD can produce more CPUs per wafer and thus help increase supply and offer lower prices.

Below we've compared both AMD and Intel's proposed price cuts, and as you can see, AMD needs to do a lot more in order to remain competitive.

Based on these prices, AMD's Athlon 64 X2 4600+ would have to beat Intel's E6600, the 4200+ would have to beat the E6400 and the X2 3800+ would have to be somewhere in between the performance of a Pentium D 940/945 and an E6300.

We're getting the impression that AMD may be cutting prices more than what we've seen here, but we have no idea to what degree yet. By the end of this year AMD will also offer higher clock speeds as well as its new 4x4 platform (dual socket, dual core desktop Athlon 64 FX motherboards), but that's all we can expect for the foreseeable future.