I noticed today that Microcenter.com has a retail boxed Pentium E2160 for $56 shipped (!!!), and that got me thinking: at what price point is an AMD CPU a better buy over an Intel CPU? It used to be that AMD was the way to go for a cheap dual core CPU, but now, I'm not so sure.

Starting to look like Intel wants to kill off AMD in a hurry.

clearing room for new cpus?

Quite possible but its still got to hurt AMD

IIRC the X2s perform better than the E2160 at stock. That's pretty much where AMD wins, at stock. OCed and AMD dies.

Randomizer, true but as Intel hits the 45nm crossover towards the end of the year both the 45nm and 65nm chips will become much cheaper.

Yea, once Nehalem mainstream chips launch Penryn will get pushed to a lower price point. What will AMD sell their top end chips for? $40?

At that point AMD loses quite a bit of money per CPU sold.

AMD is going to have to start skimping on QA so they can get poorer silicon out on the market for the low-end. Stuff that runs fine at stock but isn't any good for overclocking. They need to do anything to increase yields, and they better do it fast, they don't have long. Perhaps an AMD/Nvidia/VIA alliance? Nvidia and Intel are at each other's throats right now and both AMD and VIA could do with a finanical parter for the extra resources. I think it could work, sorta.

Generally AMD motherboards are cheaper so if you going for a platform price then you should count that in also.

TOP Intel motherboards reach $300+ while you can get a TOP AMD 790FX motherboard for about $150.

I think many people don't usually account this but they should.

Yes you can buy intel 2160 with a crappy MB but then you wont be able to OC so much and you will get inferior performance. Processor is not all

P35-DS3L + 3GHz E2160 = AMD fail.

You don't need a $300 mobo to OC.

P35-DS3L + 3GHz E2160 = $170

MSI K9A2 CF-F 790X + 3.2GHz 4800X2 = $160

AMD system will be at least 10-20% faster (clock per clock AMD is faster than Aliendales)

Here AMD wins

Rawsteel, nope Allendales are still based on the Conroe architecture just with reduced cache wich means 4 IPC while AMD has a 3 IPC giving the edge to the Allendale.

Also the E2160 isn't an Allendale either and the E2160 is a 1.6ghz chip if I remember correctly, my mother's E2200 is a 2ghz.

Edit: Spelling and yes I know its still bad...

do you have benchmarks?