AMD cuts Opteron prices by up to 35%

AMD quietly trimmed the prices of its top-two single-processor system Opteron 100 series and its dual-processor Opteron 200 series yesterday possibly paving the way for a new, faster version of the chips.

The Opteron 144's price was cut from $669 to $438, a cut of around 35 per cent. The Opteron 142 fell from $438 to $292, down 33 per cent. the Opteron 140 remains unchanged at $229. All prices are for processors sold in batches of 1000.

The Opteron 244 was previously priced at $794; now it's $690, a drop of 13 per cent. The Opteron 242's price was also cut, to $455 from $690, a fall of 24 per cent. The Opteron 240 dropped 9.5 per cent, from $283 to $256.

The price cuts suggest the imminent arrival of new, top-end 100 and 200-series Opterons, probably the 146 and 246. The latter has been expected for some time and is believed to be scheduled for a 4 August launch. We've not heard of an upcoming 100-series Opteron, but the price cuts suggest that one may nevertheless make an appearance.

AMD also cut is mobile Athlon chip prices, and those of its multi-processor Athlon MP parts:

Processor	Prev. Price	New Price	Change
Athlon MP 2800+	$275	$230	-16%
Athlon MP 2600+	$201	$174	-13%
Athlon MP 2400+	$153	$131	-14%
Athlon MP 2200+	$131	$116	-11%
Athlon MP 2000+	$116	$116
DTR* Athlon XP-M 2800+	$230	$185	-19%
DTR Athlon XP-M 2600+	$156	$108	-30%
DTR Athlon XP-M 2400+	$108	$86	-20%
DTR Athlon XP-M 2200+	$86	$71	-17%
DTR Athlon XP-M 2000+	$71	$65	-8%
DTR Athlon XP-M 1900+	$69	$59	-14%
Athlon XP-M 2500+**	$134	$99	-26%
Athlon XP-M 2400+**	$113	$91	-19%
Athlon XP-M 2200+**	$91	$76	-16%
Athlon XP-M 2000+**	$76	$69	-9%
Athlon XP-M 1900+**	$69	$59	-14%
Athlon XP-M 1800+**	$59	$55	-6%
Athlon XP-M 1700+**	$55	$55
LV*** Athlon XP-M 2000+	$134	$112	-16%
LV Athlon XP-M 1900+	$123	$105	-14%
LV Athlon XP-M 1800+	$112	$97	-13%
LV Athlon XP-M 1700+	$97	$80	-17%
LV Athlon XP-M 1600+	$80	$71	-11%
LV Athlon XP-M 1500+	$71	$57	-19%
DTR = Desktop Replacement Mainstream **LV = Low Voltage

As I understand it, recompiling software for these new processors is not difficult, and they are also designed to handle 32-bit code in a native mode. However, these new 64-bit designs don't bring much in the way of additional computational horsepower to the table, they bring the ability to handle extremely large files to the table, like tens of gigabytes of RAM. That in itself is very cool if you are into video.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that, (again, as I understand it) the only way that future processors are going to be able to take advantage of wider word lengths is going to involve a different architecture from the ones being used today, neither CISC or RISC but something more like VLIW (Very Long Instruction Word). VLIW makes it possible to handle multiple instructions in one clock cycle. Current architectures cannot do that, and how many bits does it take to contain a "fetch" command, or a "multiply" operator?

VLIW makes it possible to handle multiple instructions in one clock cycle.

That's if you have the compiler support to detect and take advantage of instruction-level parallelism.

Current architectures cannot do that,

That is not totally true. There are other schemes that achieve IPC (instructions per clock cycle) greater than 1 on super-scalar architectures. The DEC Alpha is a good example, as well as the PowerPC.

I personally think that multi-threaded architectures are the way advancement is going to be made.

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