AMD Starts a Price War in Almost Half of the Market

We reported here about AMD’s amazing Trinity pricing. Most of us believed that a $130 top performing Trinity was cheap enough, but AMD priced its entire FM2 processor line between $53 (41 EUR) and $122 (95 EUR).

While they may not be impressive when compared with top performing CPUs like the Core i7-3770K or the FX-8150, the new Trinity APUs are very competitive for their price and Intel doesn’t have anything comparable.

Most of systems integrating such CPUs don’t really go for top of the line configurations with multiple video cards and other heavy hardware and price is one of the most important factors behind the performance level.

Therefore, being slightly superior in x86 performance when compared with similarly priced Intel CPUs and considerably more powerful in graphics capabilities, AMD’s APUs are much more attractive for OEMs and this combination of pricing and performance will reportedly trigger a price war.

Some might say that this is just a storm in a cup, but the reality is that the majority of x86 CPUs sold are priced below the $200 mark and as this sector is very price sensitive, AMD might as well ignite a fuse.

Comparing Lenovo’s own Trinity implementation with the company Intel systems, we can see that a ThinkCentre M78 desktop that we presented here is priced at $480 while a Lenovo ThinkCentre M72e powered by Intel’s more modest Core i3-2120 is 38% more expensive.

Here AMD clearly has the upper hand as these systems will most likely not ship with powerful discrete graphics adapters, but will rather rely on the iGPUs where AMD has a 100% advantage in some cases.

Therefore, even if AMD is far from being able to challenge Intel on x86 performance, the company will have a serious influence on a significant portion the PC market.