Mobile Athlon, AMD fanboy spat, Intel price cuts

HWRoundup AMD today intro'ed the new top of the line notebook CPU, the mobile Athlon XP 1800+. This costs $335 and two customers, HP and ACER Europe have been outed for launch day.

And that's about it, really. The press release is here.

AMD doesn't like doing chipsets and it doesn't do mobos, but is it changing its spots?

, picking up on loose talk in Taiwan, the chip company is prepping a mainboard for the Opteron 64-bit server chip. But why would AMD do such a thing? Maybe a little kickstart for launch day will come in handy - server chip sales volumes will not exactly get the Taiwanese component guys' hearts racing.

Do we care? No we don't but there's plenty of AMD 'fanboys' who do. Some are annoyed with Tom's Hardware's Omid Rahmat for being less than glowing aboutthem. The name calling starts

.

Intel may be the overdog, but does this make AMD the underdog? If so, this is an underdog which set up more or less the same time as its arch-rival (1969 v. 1968), which has 14,000 employees, and produced c.$4bn revenues in 2001. And it has a fan-base.

AMD's sales are down this year, but then so are Intel's. And it ain't going to get any better in the summer doldrums. So what to do? In Intel's case it means cutting P4 prices and launching a new chip ahead of schedule to reduce inventory and pick up sales.

That's what 'industry insiders', interviewed by eWeek's Ken PopovichM say.

Intel is not only moving up the launch of its 2.8GHz Pentium 4 from next quarter to this summer but is also initially offering the chip at $637, with the price of its current speed king, a 2.53GHz chip, cut from $637 to $433 ... Intel will also release a 2.66GHz Pentium 4 priced at $562 per 1,000 units and a 1.9GHz Celeron costing $138.

Intel is considering moving up the release of a 3GHz Pentium 4 from the first quarter of next year to later this year, according to industry insiders".

Will this work? Probably not, but someone's got to do something, no? ®