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AMD confuses world+dog with prices

Official price far above real price

Late yesterday evening, UK time, The Reg received a little e-missive from AMD talking about their faster Athlon and also confirming price cuts they made yesterday on their microprocessors.

Look - as our PM Tony Blair might say - we pointed out that you've got to be very, very careful when you buy microprocessors.

The prices in AMD's official press release bear little or no relation to street prices. This morning we had confirmed from a representative in AMD Europe that the 1000 pricing in its press release was "official pricing" and that it did sell its microprocessors at other prices to its customers.

This can readily be confirmed by going to a stash of different Web sites, where the Athlon 1GHz T'bird is sloshing around at around the $500 mark or so. Also look at Pricewatch, which gives similar pricing to the distributor prices we published last week.

This does, however, beg a question for AMD. If the street price (that is, the real price) is so much lower than the "official" price, why not give the world+dog the OEM price, which is Intel's policy when prices change?

As it is, a whole host of wires went with AMD's official PR line, thus giving an entirely false impression of the magnitude of the price cuts made by the firm.

In fact, and until Intel decides how it is going to react to the AMD price cuts, a 1GHz Athlon is now nearly half the price of a flip chip 1GHz Pentium III. Our original story on the price cuts (link below) represent distributor prices to dealers. If someone tries to charge you an extra couple of hundred bucks for a 1GHz Athlon T'Bird, shop elsewhere.

The parts are already available in some quantity.

As we reported last weekend, although big distributors like Tech Data are listing the 1GHz Pentium III flip-chip at around $1000, so far there is still little or no stock of these parts available.

Time to forget "official pricing", we feel. ®

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