Intel Pentium 4 2.0GHz: The clock strikes two

Very Aggressive Pricing

With a tremendous amount of pricing pressure from AMD, Intel was finally forced to drop prices on the Pentium 4 line to much more competitive levels.  In July we looked at Intel’s 1.8GHz Pentium 4 and did a quick pricing comparison based on street/Intel pricing at the time:

Pentium 4 1.3GHz - $162
Pentium 4 1.4GHz - $169
Pentium 4 1.5GHz - $233
Pentium 4 1.6GHz - $294
Pentium 4 1.7GHz - $335
Pentium 4 1.8GHz - $562

Today their pricing is as follows:

Pentium 4 1.3GHz - $133
Pentium 4 1.4GHz - $133
Pentium 4 1.5GHz - $133
Pentium 4 1.6GHz - $163
Pentium 4 1.7GHz - $193
Pentium 4 1.8GHz - $256
Pentium 4 1.9GHz - $375
Pentium 4 2.0GHz - $562

What’s happening is that the lower end line of the Pentium 4 family is getting replaced by some of the faster CPUs, thus driving the price down to a pretty low point.  One thing you’ll notice is that the Pentium 4 1.3 – 1.5GHz CPUs are all priced as high as the most expensive Athlon CPU at the time of publication (Athlon 1.4GHz). 

Intel has stated that if these price cuts do not have their desired effect then they will pursue another price cut later this year.  The price of the 2.0GHz part is still pretty high; this is in line with Intel’s history of charging a premium for their fastest CPUs.  AMD used to do this in the past however recently their pricing structure has become very aggressive, with the majority of their CPUs selling for under $100. 

The combination of very aggressive pricing and cheaper 4-layer motherboards make the cost of Pentium 4 ownership much less than what it once was.  The continuously decreasing price of RDRAM helps as well, although it has yet to achieve a price parity with DDR SDRAM.