Intel's Q8200: Good news for AMD?
Friday 13th June 2008, 07:03:00 PM, written by Arun
You'd think a new, cheaper quad-core from Intel would be bad news for AMD. However, it turns out that Intel is going so soft on pricing and performance that this might actually turn out to be good news for AMD compared to most alternative scenarios.
Here is our summarized Intel pricing sheet for Q3 which will likely be the determining factor for OEMs in the Back-to-School cycle (new prices versus old):
- Q9550 @ 2.8GHz/12MiB: $316 vs $550; Q9400 @ 2.66GHz/8MiB: $266
- Q6600 @ 2.4GHz/8MiB: $203 vs $224; Q8200: 2.33GHz/4MiB: $203
- E8600 @ 3.33GHz/6MiB: $266; E8500 @ 3.16GHz/6MiB: $183 vs $266; E8400 @ 3GHz/6MiB: $163 vs $183
- E7300 @ 2.66GHz/4MiB: $133; E7200 @ 2.53GHz/4MiB: $113 vs $133; E5200 @ 2.5GHz/2MiB: $84
The dual-core pricing is about what we had expected in our previous analysis (well, E5200 is slightly lower); however, the quad-cores are being priced extremely conservatively which we did not expect to be the case. Therefore, while we remain pessimistic about AMD's capability to be competitive in the dual-core market share despite their chipset/graphics advantage, we believe their prospects for the Phenom architecture in the OEM market are actually better than we or many others had expected in this timeframe.
The big question now is how much the E5200 will hurt AMD's dual-core business. In that market, we suspect AMD's platform advantage will allow them to remain competitive, and they've still got substantial market share.
Given that it doesn't seem like the 45nm Shanghai will be ready in time for the Winter cycle and likely won't ship in huge volumes to the channel this year anyway, we also are a bit more skeptical about AMD's prospects in that timeframe. However, what happens then does depend a lot on whether Intel bothers with another price cut for Q4. Which brings up yet another question: is Intel going soft on pricing because they're greedy, or are their margins and yields for 45nm actually lower than they claim they are?
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