Nirmal Chandrasena
After several months of fixed prices, AMD and Intel have achieved their first significant price cut on desktop processors for 2003. On Feb 23, Intel's Pentium 4 prices were reduced by up to 21 per cent, followed by AMD steeply dropping select Athlon XP chips by up to 32 per cent the next day.
Intel shaved the price of the 3.06GHz Pentium 4 by eight per cent, a reduction from US$637 to US$589.
The 2.8GHz Pentium 4 was reduced by six per cent, lowering it from US$401 to US$375.
The 2.66GHz, 2.6GHz, 2.53GHz and 2.5GHz chips underwent a greater drop of 21 per cent.
This brought the 2.66GHz and 2.6GHz units from US$305 to US$241, the 2.53GHz and 2.5GHz from US$243 to US$193.
Intel also dropped the 2.4GHz by 16 per cent from US$193 to US$163.
AMD's Athlon XP 2700+ dropped 23 per cent from US$349 to US$267, the Athlon XP 2600+ dropped 19 per cent from US$297 to US$241 and Athlon 2400+ dropped a greater 27 per cent from US$193 to US$141.
The biggest reduction was seen in the Athlon XP 2200+ which dropped 32 per cent from US$157 to US$107.
Prices are in US dollars, and are based on 1,000 unit quantities. Chips will appear at retailers for different prices.