Based on your emails, it’s pretty clear where the pain point is for this audience nowadays: about $150. The vast majority of respondents mentioned a dollar figure of $100-200.
While a majority of you indicated that your pain point hadn’t shifted due to recent low prices, most of those who said that didn’t have to slide down to $150. You were already there. 🙂
The higher your pain point was a year ago, the more likely it was you slid down a bit.
While a significant number of you were still willing to spend up to $250, nobody was willing to spend more than that.
So there’s been some erosion in what people are willing to pay, but it’s not universal.
In the short run, for this audience, that’s bad news for Intel. The price for a Northwood won’t get to even nibbling range until sometime next spring, by which time the .13 micron AMD Thoroughbreds are scheduled to be around.
While the downward shift doesn’t seem like a lot, it does represent one-two typical Intel price-cutting rounds. It does buy AMD a little time should they be delayed in getting the Thoroughbred out of the gate.
When the TBirds started hitting eighteen months ago, there was considerable resistance to shifting from Intel to AMD due to the additional cost of a new mobo. The same is happening here.
Motherboards are a strange thing. Some people will change CPUs almost as often as their underwear, but a lot of people have to dragged kicking and screaming to replace their motherboard, and I don’t think it’s just because of cost.
The smartest move AMD could make to retain hobbyists is to take advantage of that reluctance and make sure those Thoroughbreds work on as many socket A boards as possible.
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