14 DAY TRIAL // AMD is trying hard to keep its market share despite increasing pressure from Intel and the company does this by slashing the prices of an entire line of processors designed for the server market segment. These price reductions will affect both single and dual core Opteron processors based on the 740 and the F sockets. All in all, seven Opteron models based on the 940 socket will soon be cheaper: the dual core models 290, 285, 280, 275 and the single core 256, 254 and 252 processors. According to the news site DailyTech the Opteron processors from the 2XX family will be priced in the interval between $538 (the dual core 290 model) and $273 (the dual core HE 270 model), coming down from $711 and $394, respectively.
The Opterons from the 8000 and 800 families, designed for multi CPU environments, will be cheaper too, but AMD reduced only the price of the tray models, leaving the retail versions intact. The 8222 dual core Opteron comes down to $1499 from the previous price of $2127, while the cheapest 8214 dual core processor will reach $518.
Tray versions of the Opteron 800 processors will also be priced from $1153 (the 890 model, dual core) to $691 (the HE 870 model, dual core), coming down from a price range between $1499 and $864. The dual cored Opteron 2000 line will also receive similar price cuts, all the way down to the already cheaper HE variants. The 2000 line of processors comes priced between $691 for the model 2222 in dual core and socket F configuration and the low power HE 2210 dual core processor that reached $173.
Another method that AMD uses in its attempt to stop Intel from gaining all the processor server market until the release of the quad core Barcelona processors is to increase the running clock frequency of some of the Opteron dual core CPUs. With just weeks to hold the market the Opteron running at 3.2GHz should do a fairly good job, while the rest of the Opteron line gets cheaper by the day.