The gang at HKEPC have received final word from their sources regarding the dramatic price cuts AMD will be using to compete with Intel's new Conroe CPU. As of July 24th, AMD will be dropping the price of its current flagship Athlon 64 FX-62 CPU an impressive 22.5% brining the total cost down from $999 to $799. Even more impressively, we find the Athlon 64 X2 5000+ dropping from $649 to an unbelievable $282! Not content to fight Intel simply with cost, AMD will debut the first 3GHz K8 CPU with the launch of the Athlon 64 FX-64 in Q4 this year. Rounding out the last of the K8 processor family, the Athlon 64 FX-66 will be released sometime in Q3 2007 and will be the last flagship processor before AMD launches K8L products in Q1 2008. One glimpse at the pricing chart provided by HKEPC and one can clearly see that anyone buying an AMD-based system would be wise to wait until July 24th. That is, unless they are convinced to switch over to Intel based on the numbers we've seen from the new Core 2 Duo processor family.
"For the upcoming Socket AM3 interface, it has 939-pins and is designed to consistent with Socket AM2. With 939 pins only, Socket AM3 processors are compatible to 940-pin Socket AM2 mainboard. The only limitation is just DDR2 and Hyper-Transport 1.0 support only. However, 940-pin Socket AM2 processors are certainly not compatible to 939-pin Socket AM3 mainboard."
Marco Chiappetta
Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com
