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Original Link: https://www.anandtech.com/show/1691
Price Guides, May 2005: Processors
by Kristopher Kubicki on May 22, 2005 10:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Guides
As always, we like to start off our price guides with a little plug for our Real Time Price Engine, quite possibly the fastest growing price engine on the internet. We thought we would mention that we just added our 5,000 th product a few days ago, and we are happy to boast that site traffic for the RTPE had quadrupled since December. Thanks for choosing the RTPE and the QuickSearch RSS!
Merchant news this week has been relatively bland since last week. Newegg’s spinoff, ChiefValue, continues to dominate the price landscape. Last week, CV held the lowest prices on 20% of our listed products, but Monarch and ZipZoomFly aren’t just sitting around. Pricing across the board are much lower than usual.
There have been several new products since our last CPU guide. AMD unleashed its dual core madness several weeks ago, and we brought coverage on the Opterons and Athlon 64 X2s, and merchants are just starting to ship some of those processors now (which we, of course, have added to our price engine). Intel has quietly released some new low end SKUs, and of course, their dual core solution is also geared up for sometime before June (check out Part I and Part II of our Intel dual core analysis here). With all these new SKUs from AMD and Intel, it can get fairly difficult to pick out a processor. Last week, we wrote a small little update on some of the core names and details to help combat that!
In other price engine related news, we started listing DDR memory kits instead of single stick products. The new kits are denoted as “2x512MB”, “2x256”, etc. Of course, if you see a product that we don’t have yet, feel free to email us and let us know!
Intel Pentium 4
Last guide, we were impressed that Intel managed to release their “ Prescott 2M” Pentium 4 [RTPE: “Pentium 4” 2MB] processors ahead of schedule. Intel CPU pricing is fairly stringently controlled, and so after the initial fluctuations while shipments were coming in, prices have pretty much leveled out at where they will remain until the next pre-determined price cuts. A new Prescott 2M, clocking at 3.8GHz, is also in Intel’s near future. We are under NDA for those sorts of topics, but in completely unrelated news, May 26 th looks like it will be a wonderful day for a picnic.For those of us not ready to move up to the larger cached chips, Intel is still breathing life into the 5xx series with some new SKU announcements. Several months ago, all Pentium 4 5xx ( Prescott) processors received a revision bump as Intel enabled XD protection on their chips. These new processors received the “J” suffix although most merchants didn’t really differentiate the “J” processors from their non-XD predecessors. Sometime this month, Intel will start shipping the XD processor successors, which end in a “1”. These new processors are identical to the “J” revisions, but now also have EM64T. For those of you following at home, you may recall that EM64T instructions are already on the Prescott core, and enabling the extensions doesn’t require any new fabrication techniques on Intel’s behalf. Expect the “5x1” processors to replace the “5x0” processors quickly.
The 3.4GHz Pentium 4 550s are the most popular Pentium on the market right now, but prices aren’t moving:
Intel Pentium 4 (775) 550 800FSB 1MB
The dual core “ Smithfield” Pentium D processors are starting to show up for preorder on several vendors. Pricing seems extremely competitive, but we will have more details once the chips are actually available.
Intel Celeron D
Celeron is also getting a facelift. The existing “3x5” and “3x0” processors will all increase their product number by one, but gain EM64T extensions. This is an interesting move, since AMD has put some emphasis on 64-bit instructions for their non-budge chips only. Unilateral 64-bit support sounds pretty nice.Pentium M
Don’t forget to check out Anand’s details on ASUS’s Socket 479 to Socket 478 adaptor. Pentium M seems to be losing headlines and fanfare faster than American Idol - mostly due to non-competitive pricing, poor motherboards and better alternatives from AMD and Intel. After all, why buy a $300 processor with a $200 motherboard on slow memory that won’t outperform a $200 Venice processor?The only Pentium M that seems to be showing any movement at all is the 1.7GHz Pentium M 735 [RTPE: BXM80536GC1700F]. Prices are still highway robbery, but at least the CPU is $10 cheaper than it was a month ago:
Athlon 64
AMD had some big announcements lately. Aside from the dual core stuff, the new “E3” and “E4” stepping chips finally started to make their way onto the retail marketplace. These new chips, dubbed “ Venice” and “ San Diego”, are just slightly newer steppings of the existing 90nm chips, but the finer tuned memory controller and SSE3 instructions are a welcomed addition. Feel free to check out Derek’s initial coverage on K8 E stepping here. If AMD product SKUs have you confused, you might want to briefly check out page two of our AMD CPU update here.Due to AMD’s incredibly “buyer friendly” [sic] product naming, we had to recently revamp the way our processors were listed in the RTPE. Since die process, cache size, clock speed, stepping and socket size all vary within products that are named the same, we had to start annotating a core name to the end of each product in our database. This is slightly unnecessary if you know AMD’s product SKU strategy well enough, but after doing this for five years, I still don’t have it quite memorized. Just keep these important names in mind:
- Hammer: 1MB (sometimes 512KB due to half cache disabled), 130nm, “C0” Socket 754 and Socket 939
- Newcastle : 512KB, 130nm, “CG” Socket 754 and Socket 939
- Winchester : 512KB, 90nm, “D0” Socket 939
- Venice : 512KB, 90nm, “E3” Socket 939
- San Diego : 1MB, 90nm, “E4” Socket 939
With prices as cheap as they are, if you’re going for a new system, we have to recommend a Socket 939 processor. Not only because the 90nm processors run considerably cooler than their 130nm predecessors, but also because Socket 939 prices are actually more competitive [RTPE: Athlon 64 3200+]! The minor boosts in SSE3 and dual channel memory are just icing on the cake.
The Venice processors grab our pick of the week, even if they cost marginally more than the Winchester variants. Oddly, when Winchester prices didn’t fall even though Venice and San Diego processors started showing up at retail merchants en masse, we started to get the impression that many merchants were just going to continue to sell the chips as “Athlon 64” chips and make no mention of the core features. If there will not be a discount for non-SSE3 90nm processors, then it doesn’t make sense to purchase a non-SSE3 chip. The Winchester Athlon 64 3500+ seems to be the only exception to that generalization. Let’s take a look at the price trends over the last few months:
AMD Athlon 64 (939) 3500+ 512KB Winchester
Athlon 64 X2 preorders are starting to crop up, but there seems to be a lot of indication that Intel will beat them to the desktop market first. On another side note, we have heard several reports about 90nm Athlon 64 processors performing poorly in MSI’s K8N Neo4 product line. We will have more details for you in the near future, but if you are in between motherboards and you are also planning a 90nm purchase, you may want to stay away from the K8N until we can either verify or dispute those K8N reports. Our guess is that some new BIOSes should fix the performance issues.
Sempron
Sempron just keeps on chugging. The Socket 754, cache deficient, 32-bit processors have even more naming problems than their Athlon 64 counterparts. Several weeks back, we started tracking “BO” Palermo Semprons, as opposed to the “BA” ones floating around right now. The “BA” Palermos are essentially identical to the “BO” ones with the addition of SSE3. Unlike Intel, AMD’s budget chips do not have 64-bit support. Our RTPE admin Lawrence Hsieh mentioned something along the lines of, “I don’t really know what AMD did, but they named two different cores with the same name, but gave them different SKU designations.” Hilarity ensues.Furthermore, we started tracking a new Socket 754 Sempron, the 2500+. AMD seems confused on this product as well as that the SKU designates the processor as a 128KB Palermo, but resellers and AMD documentation claim that it is a 256KB processor instead. If the chip ever shows up on the market, you can be sure that we will mention something about it then.
Even though the marketing direction seems off base, the socket 754 processors are still excellent values for the aspiring overclocker or Linux novice. The Socket 754 Sempron 2600+, 2800+ and 3000+ [RTPE: SDA2600AIO2BA, SDA2800AIO3BA, and SDA3000AIO2BA] all are great buys if 64-bit support is not something important. Judging by the number of problems with Windows XP x64, particularly driver support, it seems that 64-bit has some time to mature first anyway.
We are running out of nice things to say about Athlon XP, unfortunately. Prices are now inflated, and even the Sempron 462s are starting to climb in price as Barton cores inevitably dry up. Athlon XP-Mobile chips are still the well-kept secret of Socket 462, but your money is really better spent on an Athlon 64 at this point.
Intel Xeon, AMD Opteron
Dual core Opterons are the most interesting thing to occur to server processors in a long while. Although we covered AMD and Intel’s side of the dual core race extensively, Opteron has some pretty strong selling points with regard to multiple processor and multiple core scalability. Although certainly novel, the cost of these processors has yet to stabilize while the cheapest available dual core processor costs upwards of $1500!The server market doesn’t have much else going on right now, and aside from a few new Irwindale introductions, there really isn’t much to comment on. nForce4 Pro for AMD servers is quite fantastic, and certainly worth the praise that it received from the reviews around the web. Now that Socket 940 is relatively affordable and more importantly competitive, these dual core behemoths should really make for some interesting benchmarks in the near future.
Finally, below, you can see a glimpse of Xeon pricing for the week. The Irwindale processors are starting to show up more frequently, but only at a few merchants still. The preorder prices have dropped dramatically in the last few weeks, but prices won’t stabilize for another month or so.