Dual core Turion 'to spark price war'

By Steve Malone

Posted on 24 Mar 2006 at 12:59

The upcoming launch of the dual-core Turion processor from AMD may spark a price war according to sources in Taiwan.

According to the local news service DigiTimes, AMD plans to price the new processors aggressively in order to grab market share from Intel.

Slated for launch 9 May, the new Turion X2 64 processors will be supplied in a range of clock speeds ranging from 1.6GHz for the entry-level model up to 2.2GHz for the top-end device with 2MB of L2 cache.

While AMD has had some success in eating into Intel's market share in the server market with the Opteron and the desktop market with the Athlon range, it has been having a tougher time in the notebook market where the Centrino platform is overwhelmingly dominant.

However, this time AMD will have more of a fight on its hands. In the previous two markets it has not only been able to come in with a cheaper price but also arrive early with features such as 64-bit processing or dual-core technology.

This time Intel, which launched its own dual-core Core Duo notebook processor- formerly known by its code name Napa - at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas at the beginning of the year, will also be making sure that there will be less of a price advantage for the Turion X2 64 range.

According to DigiTimes, Intel is planning swingeing price cuts of between 13 and 50 per cent for its dual-core processors in April with further price cuts pencilled in for the third quarter.

Although the Core Duo was launched with the traditional ballyhoo, with the added bonus of debuting in the Apple MacBook, Taiwanese sources report that sales of the top-end Core Duo machines have been disappointing with prices ranging from between $1,375 and $2,015.