Intel aims at AMD's margins, lowers prices

An article over at PCWorld reports that Intel has instituted targeted price drops of as much as 50% in a possible attempt to push even harder on AMD’s market share.

Intel Corp. appears to have undertaken some precision cutting in this round, re-pricing chips likely to catch attention, such as a quad-core microprocessor aimed at desktop PCs. The company slashed the price of the Q6600, a Core 2 Quad processor that runs at 2.4GHz, to US$266, down 50 percent, according to a new price list on Intel’s Web site dated July 22.

…Intel’s main rival stopped a six month decline in market share during the second quarter, according to preliminary estimates from iSuppli Corp. AMD’s market share climbed a half a percentage point in the second quarter to 11.4 percent, while Intel’s fell by exactly the same amount to 80.3 percent, the industry researcher said.

Most of this is taking place on the desktop, not in HPC-class machines. But we can hope the competition will spill over.