Intel Builds Atom CPU For $8, Sells It For Up To $135

[ChuckT]

In some ways, Intel has to pay for its overhead but in other ways they are making a 150% to 1588% markup.

Intel’s profit margin

[Boot_WB]

For a company like Intel, the "hidden" costs (R&D, marketing, bribes, etc) must be a huge proportion of the per-unit overheads. Sounds like someone at Tom's Guide wants to make headlines imho.

I'm not saying that Intel are only making peanuts, but the production costs of a wafer are not going to be the major outgoings for such a company.

[tokyoracer]

Simple answer, go AMD.

[HopperJF]

ChuckT wrote:
In some ways, Intel has to pay for its overhead but in other ways they are making a 150% to 1588% markup.

Intel’s profit margin

Interesting, but kind of contradicts the story of the EU doing an early morning raid on DSG because their Intel prices were "too cheap" to be competitive with AMD.

This means that customers pay more.

Thanks a lot EU-bunch of w**kers!  :-)

Link

[Boot_WB]

HopperJF wrote:

ChuckT wrote:
In some ways, Intel has to pay for its overhead but in other ways they are making a 150% to 1588% markup.

Intel’s profit margin

Interesting, but kind of contradicts the story of the EU doing an early morning raid on DSG because their Intel prices were "too cheap" to be competitive with AMD.

This means that customers pay more.

Thanks a lot EU-bunch of w**kers!  :-)

Link

Good grief, I feel sullied. There was no warning or anything. WARNING: clicking the link above will take you to the Daily Express website.

Shudder (thinks about wiping laptop hard drive and reinstalling windows)

[arkanoid]

It's called long-term thinking, HopperJF. You may temporarily happy paying artificially low prices, but Intel were trying to drive a competitor out of the market. Competition is good for customers, price rigging is NOT!

If Intel were to succeed in driving AMD and all other competitors out of the market, I can assure you, a 150% to 1588% price mark-up would seem like a bargain!

You should be thanking the EU for preventing market dominance because that would be when prices would go through the roof. And you and I could do absolutely nothing about it. The EU were doing a good job, for a change. :crazy:

[bloodline]

Silicon is cheap! That's why you and I can have a supercomputer in a laptop... But just because silicon is cheap doesn't mean that the development cost of the chip design is cheap...

Intel probably spends millions on prototypes and various development systems, these cost can only be recovered by the high Cost of the resulting chip...

[Xamiche]

tokyoracer wrote:
Simple answer, go AMD.

It'll be a cold cold day in hell before I do that.

As mentioned by others here, did they factor in R&D and marketing when coming up with this cost per unit?

It's called long-term thinking, HopperJF. You may temporarily happy paying artificially low prices, but Intel were trying to drive a competitor out of the market. Competition is good for customers, price rigging is NOT!

I agree completely. I like having AMD around. It keeps the cost of my Pentium CPUs down.

[Hattig]

$8 including packaging and taking the yield into account? That's impressively low.

The mark up on the higher end is taking the mick though. It's not as if that high end is actually very high end, indeed it's just about bearable because of design tradeoffs to achieve very low power consumption. I bet that OEMs will cut deals though.

This CPU will "only" be used in a few million devices before it is replaced though. It also took a team of people 4 years to develop. Per-chip development costs could run to a few dollars imaginably. Then there is marketing. And myriad other costs.

The Diamondville Atoms will be cheaper though. Part of the markup is the tiny tiny package these Atoms utilise.

[Amithony]

tokyoracer wrote:
Simple answer, go AMD.

I would advise against it. The Athlons I have had experience with have been unreliable at best. Although once you get a good cooling system, it seems to go ok. Much more high maintenance in my opinion. Just get a PPC and a playstation if you want the latest games

[Retro_71]

If you all remember back before the AMD Athlon Intel had very very high prices, why becuase they didn't have proper compertition in regards to CPU speeds that changed when AMD released Athlon which wiped the floor with the intel chips (i know becuase i was building intel Computer then Switched to AMD for 6 years) and now that AMD has stumbled (first their chip set and Second buying ATI (where they wanted NVidia (BTW Intel pretended to be interested in Nvidia to raise there price so that AMD could not buy them hence they got ATI))).
Anyway now that AMD CPU aren't that fast (compared to Intel) Intel is back to it's old ways. That just the way they are there out to screw everyone.
I don't like them but i have to build Intel PC for work. :pissed:

[Retro_71]

Amithony wrote:

tokyoracer wrote:
Simple answer, go AMD.

I would advise against it. The Athlons I have had experience with have been unreliable at best. Although once you get a good cooling system, it seems to go ok. Much more high maintenance in my opinion. Just get a PPC and a playstation if you want the latest games

I have never had that many problems with AMD's. I still have 2-7 year old AMD still working with no problems (considering all the offices and servers i have built where AMD very very few had problems) some had 3rd party cooling other didn't.

[alexh]

I think the article is likely to be bull. They couldnt hope to sell into the market they are aiming at with $45 let alone $135

[tokyoracer]

This PC has an AMD Atlon XP 2600 (462) and it has been working since 2001. NEVER had an issue with it, most dependable bit of hardweare I've owned. I'v had nothing but trouble with Intel CPU's. Intel Outside please!

Not only this, today Athlons offers great performance to value ratios with most of their CPU's. My big box has a 3800 and thats still working (which I would expect as it's only a year old now).

[shoggoth]

Please. Initial pricing has to cover development costs.