Jam for PC buyers as AMD keeps heat on Intel

As expected, Intel reduced Pentium MMX and Pentium II chips by up to 57 per cent, while AMD took up to 55 per cent off K6 prices to continue its position of offering a 25 per cent discount on the chip behemoth based on equivalent performance processors.

The biggest cuts apply to Intel's 300MHz Pentium II which now sits at $851 per piece when bought in quantities of 1,000. The 233MHz Pentium MMX loses 35 per cent to go to $386 and the 200MHz MMX falls 49 per cent to $252. The fast-disappearing 133MHz and 150MHz vanilla Pentiums now each cost $95.

AMD's K6/233 goes from $469 to $289 while the K6/200 is sliced from $349 to $189 and the K6/166 downshifts from $244 to $109.

"Our value proposition remains unchanged: no matter how much or how little users want to spend for their PCs, they will get higher performance from systems based on the AMD-K6 processor," said Vinod Dham, group vice president of AMD's computation products group.

AMD said it shipped over 350,000 K6 processors during the April-June second quarter and expects to produce more than one million units this July-September quarter.