From PC World: If you listened to AMD’s investor briefing on Thursday, you didn’t get the whole picture: AMD also quietly cut the prices of its mainstream CPUs, and said it had begun shipping its first “Carrizo” chips, the Carrizo-L for desktop PCs.
Unfortunately, those chips are being shipped to Chinese customers first ahead of a global rollout, AMD said. As my colleague Brad Chacos noted, AMD is referring to Carrizo as a “sixth-generation” part, implying that it's more advanced than Intel’s own fifth-generation Core chips.
AMD’s price cuts were relatively modest, compared to the Oct. 2014 price list that was still posted on AMD’s site at press time. The high-end, 4GHz A10-7850K chip was cut by $15, for example, to $127—a drop of 11 percent. In total, AMD cut the prices of seven chips.
AMD said Thursday that it’s prepared to pursue Intel in the high end of the market once again, announcing plans to develop a high-end “Zen” core that breaks from many of AMD’s earlier designs. Before that, however, there’s Carrizo—and the first chips in that line will run at speeds up to 2.5GHz, according to specs AMD released Thursday.
While Carrizo doesn’t represent a make-or-break proposition from AMD, the company has struggled to maintain profitability. Under new chief executive Lisa Su, AMD has tossed out its low-end focus with an eye towards gaining “profitable market share” in businesses like graphics and datacenter chips. But about half of AMD’s revenue will still come from the PC, and that’s where Carrizo comes in.
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