In a pre-emptive move against Intel's rumored July 22 price drops, AMD is cutting nearly the entire processor line from top to bottom up to 30 percent, just about half a year before the anticipated introduction of their next-generation Phenom processor.
From the top down, AMD cut the price of the 3GHz Athlon 64 FX-74 from $799 to $599, a drop of 25 per cent. The dual-core FX-72's price remains unchanged, at $599, but the remainder of AMD's dual-core desktop CPUs, the Athlon 64 X2 line, all became cheaper by between 29.8 per cent and 15.4 per cent.
All mainstream processors are now priced well below the $200 mark, while the 4400+ and 4000+ are the new entry-level dual-core processors with prices of $94 and $73 respectively. AMD had been expected to drop its single core Athlon 64 series, but instead saw $10-15 knocked off their prices too.
The CPU price war between AMD and Intel continues to heat up as Intel is expected to roll out its own price cuts, along with revised Core 2 Duo and other desktop processors later this month.