AMD slashes Athlon prices

AMD dropped the prices on all of its Athlon desktop chips, which compete with Intel's Pentium 4 family. After this round of cuts, AMD's current top processor, the 1.4GHz Athlon, is priced at a whopping $3 less than Intel's 1.4GHz Pentium 4. AMD also slashed the prices of both versions of its 1.4GHz from $253 to $130, and its 1.3GHz and 1.33GHz from $230 to $125. Both versions of its 1.2GHz chip also fell from $199 to $120, and anything with a slower clock speed than 1.2GHz was reduced to $115. The prices of the 1.13GHz and 1.1GHz processors were reduced from $179, while both versions of AMD's 1GHz processor were reduced from $160, according to information on the company's Web site. Chip prices are in quantities of 1,000 units, a standard measurement of chip sales. AMD has two versions of some of its Athlon chips; while both versions have the same clock speed, the difference is the speed of the path between the actual processor and the system's memory. One features a 266MHz front-side bus, and the other features a 200MHz front-side bus, but both traditionally feature identical pricing. The 200MHz version of the bus allows the processor to run with slightly cheaper RAM.