Very interesting article at CRN. According to the piece, AMD has no further plans to cut prices of Athlon and FX processors. CRN quotes Gary Bixler, AMD's director of marketing for North America, as saying:

Effectively, AMD is announcing that the price war is over (at least on its end). Intel, for its part, could continue to apply pressure with another round of cuts after 7/22/07.

http://www.crn.com/white-box/201001613

If AMD doesn't come up with a product to compete with Intel's Core 2 they will have to give their processors away. Or, are they already doing that?

I disagree. Amd doesn't have to give away anything. The Dell deal to sell amd systems at walmart is key to more people using amd cpus. The average Joe doesn't care about benchmarks. They just want a cpu that can handle vista and is affordable.

So very true! Up until only about 3 or 4 years ago AMD was also fighting the question "Who is AMD and are they compatible and reliable?" from your typical PC buyer. AMD pretty much kept from advertising heavily in order to keep their prices competitive but in the long run it may have hurt them more than it helped.

Time will tell.

At the prices AMD is selling CPUs to Dell, they are giving them away. Getting your "name" to the masses is not worth much if you fail to make enough money to keep competitive operations going. Profitability drives development.

You mean aggressive competition drives innovation and development. Intel was making profit on their POS Netburst, it was neither competitive or an Innovative CPU. Profit only drives company and investor morale, thats why Intel didn't innovate the CORE arc until AMD started DELETED it's server sales(Big Money).

I'm not exactly sure what the point of this thread is. According to the same article, AMD dropped prices 33% last week and there were numerous articles stating that the retail prices were actually less than tray prices. Aside from that, this forum has gone over the "price drop strategy" before and how price drops are used to unload older stock to make room for newer products; especially given that Barcelona and Phenom are slated to be released 3Q07 and 1Q08.

And, AMD is not "giving" anything away.

My *** there wont be more price cuts By AMDs own admission K8 will still be making up the bulk of their shipments deep into 2008.

They will cut prices again when Intel launches their 45 nm CPUs.

If you believe anything an AMD or Intel marketer drivels out you have only yourself to blame

The key word is "imminent" meaning not anytime soon. I'm sure once their Holy Grail is release, the production of current AM2 CPUs will be slowly phased out and price cuts will ensure they will sell off their existing inventory at that point in time.

I Agree. Wombat's ***.

And I'll state my theory again that AMD would be in a lot better shape today if they had axed their prices before core 2 was released. They knew what intel had for several months before the release. They could have tempted lots more people to go with their chips and be locked into their upgrade path if they had halved the prices 6 weeks before core 2 came out. They just ended up not selling any chips and lowering the prices to that point anyway.

We'll see what happens when barcelona mature's a bit.

I kinda have to disagree. It doesn't matter as much as you used to before Intel decided to drop the "Pentium" name. That damn name meant the world to Non-PC heads. Intel beat into our brains that the Intel Pentium II III IV Inside were the end all be all of PC's and anything less is crap.
Ever since they dropped that name things seem to have changed, people are now more on this manufacturer tip. Now its, I have to get a DELL or a Gateway or its crap.
Now stuff could have a Cyrix nobody would care as long as Dell or Gateway made it.

Just a added note, I think its a bad idea for AMD to drop Athlon myself. IMO Athlon has made itself a pretty decent name for itself over the years. Its not pentium status, but I still wouldnt abandon it from a PR standpoint myself.

Without funds you can not sustain aggressive competition, innovation, or development. Invester backlash has been the downfall of many. I'm not cutting AMD, they need to be profitable. AMD going from the "big money" to the budget Dell Wall-Mart special is not going to pull in enough funds to compete with the Intel powerhouse.
BTW Intel was making a profit with their POS Netburst, quite a large one.
AMD does need a "Holy Grail", Barcelona is not going to be it and Phenom might be too late.

So AMD Doesnt have anything that will hang with a core 2? I Beg to differ.. take a look at the cpu charts, the 6000+ hangs in there quite nicely.

The 6000+ only hangs with mid-range E6600 and E6650. The E6750 is its competition now.