Intel CPU Pricing

Based on data from The Register.

To give you a rough idea of what you’d actually pay for them and when, I’ve added about $30 to the price and shifted the date to roughly two weeks after the announcement of the price cut. It’s doubtful you’ll see this kind of pricing March 15 due to the part shortage, and there is always the possibility that Intel’s shortages will not be finished by April. I’ve also only included prices for 100Mhz Coppermines since if you want to overclock, you don’t want a 133Mhz FSB chip.

**Due to shortages, availability of these parts is likely to be iffy at that date in the reseller market, and it is likely that resellers will charge more than the price listed due to this.

Personally, I like what I see from May 10th on. By then, the processors you buy should have the stepping improvement from Intel, and I would expect that the 650Mhz processor should be likely to get to a bit over 900Mhz at a reasonable price. Intel plans on introducing the 866Mhz processor next week and the 933Mhz in May, so they apparently think they can get 933Mhz consistently with the new stepping.

Might a 1Ghz be possible from these chips? I don’t doubt some will make it, but just don’t count on it yet. Intel apparently doesn’t want to go much beyond a 1Ghz with the Coppermine, which should tell you tell you something.

While we don’t have pricing that advanced for AMD’s processors, the .18 micron 750Mhz will be down to a little less than $400 by the end of this month, and AMD looks like it will price aggressively during the spring..

If you do not plan to overclock and can’t wait until the summer, the .18 Athlons look like a high-performance bargain during the spring unless you heavily use SSE-optimized applications. They look like they’ll be a good deal cheaper than equivalent Intel chips. Additionally, there are hints we might also see the first DDR motherboards available for Athlon chips during the spring.

We also have some initial Coppermine-128 (Celeron) pricing. The source for these prices is
The Register and again, I’ve added about $30 and two weeks as I did for the Coppermines:

**See caveat above.

Many of you are probably asking “Where are these Celerons?” Good question. Either we are going to hear about them very, very soon, or this is a vaporware announcement (I suspect the latter and we won’t really see them until April). Nonetheless, if you don’t have “Coppermine-ready” equipment, this looks like the route you should take for a good cheap upgrade as soon as we’re sure these chips can run at 100Mhz and BIOS upgrades are available.

Figure these chips will be about 7-10% slower than a regular Coppermine at the same speed. Then again, it’s possible you might be able to run these at 112Mhz and make up that difference. We’ll just have to see. The 566 and 600 have the chance of becoming the best overclocking chips we’ve ever seen.

Another reason why you might like the Celeron over the Coppermine is the availability of motherboards. We may see a situation where the Solano2 boards are announced, but may take a while to become available in volume in the retail channel. Rumors have it that it may be June until these boards are widely available, and we still have no idea if they are any better than BX boards in performance.

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