Cheapzilla: I'm a gonna get you Chipzilla

The significance of the AMD keyring shaped like a boxing glove which it was giving away at CeBIT last week became clear today as the company delivered a sock in the jaw to Intel on pricing. As we revealed last week, the price of the Athlon 700 is now around the $270 mark, really piling the pressure on Intel. The other prices are very much in line with the story we published last week, which you can find here. Note that these prices are very different from 1K published prices that AMD makes public. The reasons are because the distributor channel and the OEM channel get better deals, because they need their margins. Confusing? Not really, as long as you stick to one or the other. For example, the 700MHz Athlon, AMD's sweet spot, has a published price of $389/1000 -- vastly different. An AMD representative said today that it would not give public details of prices to distributors or to large OEMs. The news comes just a day after Intel lowered prices on its processor family, in a frantic bid to keep up with the contender. Intel's 700MHz Pentium III Coppermine costs $417. That, again, is a published tray price for 1,000 of the beasties. It will be interesting to see whether Intel will take drastic action to match AMD, or whether it will hold its corporate horses and sweat it out. It still has, after all, capacious pockets full of wads of greenbacks. ® Intel confirms price slides