AMD Phases Out Single-Core CPUs, Lowers Dual-Core Prices

AMD has had some pretty serious problems over the past two years, mostly caused – quite obviously – by their ongoing war with the rivals from Intel. These problems were further deepened by the fact that Core 2 Duo architectures behave far better than any of AMD's CPUs in just about any application, and this state of facts has led to a very serious slump in the company's market share. Moreover, even if everyone's expecting the August launch of their future quad-core family of processors, code-named Barcelona, there is still a lot of skepticism related to its actual performances.

For these reasons, and also in an attempt to cut its very serious losses, the company decided to make a bold (yet not quite unexpected) move and almost completely eliminate its single-core line-up, while cutting the prices of their dual-cores CPUs. Thus, according to an article by Kristopher Kubicki for DailyTech, AMD has decided to completely phase out all single-core Athlon and Sempron models currently on retail. Moreover, the company's also dropping two of its lowest-cost dual-cores, namely the Athlon 64 X2 3800+ and 3600+, currently priced at $79 and $69, respectively.

However, we're not talking about a worldwide move, since the ultra-low cost Athlon 64 3500+, Athlon 64 3200+, Sempron 3500+ and Sempron 3200+ will continue to exist in high growth markets, like Brazil, Russia, India and China, where most customers can't really afford to purchase the more expensive dual or quad-core versions.

As for the price-cuts mentioned earlier, they're quite impressive, at least in some cases. Thus, the top-range 6000+ model will retail for just $169 (a $60 drop from the previous 229 US dollars price), while the other models, down to 4000+, will record price drops between 20-40 US dollars.

As suspected, besides the aforementioned reasons, this move also has an Intel-related cause. Thus – as the same article from DailyTech informs us – it would seem that these price-cuts actually represent a pre-emptive strike at Intel, which also announced a wave of price-cuts for July 22. However, it's still debatable whether AMD's decision will make any difference, but we'll probably have to wait until fall to see its exact effects.

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