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 In an interview given to the Austin American Statesman, AMD’s new CEO, Dirk Meyer, expanded on its asset smart strategy which was previously described as a major restructuring.
He notably confirmed that by the end of the year his company would move activities related to production to a new company which would most likely not be 100% AMD owned. This possibility had already been mentioned by various sources; however, it was never officially confirmed at such a high level. You may recall, this wasn’t exactly Dirk Meyer’s decision but rather the project on which the former CEO, Hector Ruiz, was working on for some time. Moreover, he is still working on it as he has remained as Executive Chairman and President of the board of directors in charge of asset smart strategy.
This will enable AMD to concentrate on R&D as well as the sales and marketing of its CPUs, GPUs, chipsets and platforms while cleaning up its operations. We will just have to see if this will eventually have an impact on the close interaction and collaboration between circuit developers and production units, something that is indispensable in order to be competitive with Intel. |
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 Following Intel’s announcement of price reductions two days ago, we have received a document with some details on its next price list update. This will take place on August 10th and will indeed involve the Q9550 which will move down a notch due to the arrival of the Q9650. We will also see the release of the Q9400, E8600 and E7300 which were previously mentioned.
The main news, however, is that the company will also introduce on that month the Core 2 Q8200 (2.33 GHz, FSB 1333, 4 MB of L2 cache, 45nm), Pentium Dual Core E5200 (2.5 GHz, FSB 800, 2 MB of L2 cache, 45nm) and rather oddly enough a mono core Celeron 450 (2.2 GHz, FSB 800, 512 KB of L2 cache) and this is when the dual core Celeron E1200 will already have been available for more than six months.
However, the strangest is the relatively low frequency of the Q8200. According to roadmaps, which have up until now been published, it is supposed to replace the Q6600 (2.4 GHz, FSB 1066, 8 MB of L2 cache, 65nm) that has twice as much L2 and a slightly lower price. Of course, the latter does not have the benefits related to Penryn architecture and it is still engraved in 65nm but it will be interesting to compare performances in practice. On the entry level, the E5200, which should be sold for roughly 65€ (taxes included) in France, could be a good surprise if it proves to be as docile as some of its predecessors in overclocking. |
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Correction : This news item has now been corrected as we made some initial errors due to a wrong date on AMD’s price list. In the first news, we applied the reduction indicated by AMD via an email to the prices on their webpage which in fact already took them them into account!
A few days ago, AMD took advantage of the launch of the Phenom X4 9950 to readjust its price list. Phenom X3/X4 prices were reduced 10 to 14%, while those of Athlon 64 X2s were lowered 16 to 27%. These reductions seem insufficient compared to a recent similar move by Intel because the Q6600 is now less expensive than the Phenom X4 9850 while for the price of an A64 6400+ we can opt for an E8400 instead of the previous E8300. Moreover, even if there was a big reduction for the 6000+, note that this actually involves positioning it against the E7200 which is found for the same price.
 Otherwise, the rest of the A64 X2 line, the 5400+, 5200+ and 5000+ (2.9, 2.7 and 2.5 GHz) are positioned against the Pentium Dual Core E2220, E2200 and E2180 which are at 2.4, 2.2 and 2 GHz. In the end, these could be the only ones in AMD’s CPU line to be competitive, at least in terms of performance. |
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