Topic: Processors

After saving up all Summer -- and finding out my finances were so bad that if I didn't get my job I would have been screwed -- I have finally brought myself to purchasing a nice upgrade. After a lovely patent bet coming off -- that's 3 singles, 3 doubles, and a triple -- I managed to pick up a lovely AMD Opteron 170, with stepping CCBBE 0615EPMW.

Yesterday AMD announced price cuts of between 17-47% across their Opteron product lineup. These price cuts affect AMD’s Opteron processors for Socket 940, 939, AM2 and 1207 chipsets. So, this was another widespread cut by AMD to counter Intel's Conroe based chips. The most important of these cuts for the enthusiast user will be the Socket 939 Opteron 100 series price cuts which cover the entire 100 series -- these cuts will be in the range of 19-46%.

When Dailytech first reported that Microsoft was going to intentionally cripple HD DVD and Blu-ray support in Vista 32-bit I was actually quite pleased. Whilst some may complain this is another ploy to get them to upgrade their systems, for something they can already do, this would have been a positive step towards 64-bit computing. So I was unhappy when I heard from the Inquirer that the story was actually far from the truth.

Dailytech reports that Dell have ordered 2 million AMD based computers; which breaks down into 1.2 million desktops and 0.8 million laptops. Is it not surprising that Conroes performance advantage is a negligible advantage as far as the OEMs are concerned; I ranted previously that a processors power only helps when enthusiast sales are concerned.

Ever since the benchmarks for the Conroe chip, aka Core 2 Duo, leaked out at Xtreme Systems many amongst the enthusiast community have been foretelling AMD's decline. However, we must accept that the enthusiast market is a very small minority in computer sales, and the general ignorance of the casual user. Ordinary Joe doesn't know that Conroe is the way to go when he steps into PC World -- heck they probably don't even have them for sale right now. Now one might argue that this information trickles down from enthusiasts into the mind of the casual buyer. After all, that is how AMD got their market share, by being the performance/price leader.

The AMD, Advanced Micro Devices, and ATI, Array Technologies Incorporated, merger has finally been confirmed.

Now, in the enthusiast community there has been quite some discussion on this merger from the first day it was rumoured. Whether AMD plans on using ATI's expertise in producing motherboards and GPUs is unknown. It would seem obvious that AMD plans on setting up in house motherboard production -- probably keeping it under the ATI name -- as competition is lacking in this sector. The only significant competitor to the enthusiast market being nVidia, whilst Via provide competition for the mainstream OEMs.