AMD pricing itself into a black hole with the Thorton
IF AND WHEN AMD'S new AthlonFX "Thorton" goes on sale - and it's not yet certain if that name is anything other than a marketing doodle, it's unclear where the chip wil fit in the pricing scheme of things.
The story is that the "Thorton" will be available at speed grades between 2000+ and 2600+ model ratings.
In terms of its performance, the chip should be identical or just slightly slower because of lower cache-associativity than Thoroughbred, but how AMD intends to make any money on this new chip remains a mystery.
Consider Intel's price structure: A Celeron 2GHz, perfectly capable for all sorts of office tasks and tolerable for gaming is for sale at $69 in retail packaging.
Even the 2.6 GHz model can be had for as little as $126, and considering how well most Celerons seem to overclock, this is just a milch cow for the chip giant.
The Pentium 4 is a very different story. A P4 2.4 GHz "C" costs $171, and the 3.2GHz model, if you simply must own one, could set you back as much as $700 retail-boxed, according to current prices from newegg.com.
The price and performance delta between the Celeron and the Pentium 4 has allowed Intel to take even its lowest-common-denominator processor and toss it out the door at a low price, take a small margin, and provide the market with a processor with acceptable overall performance.
