With Intel’s new Alder Lake CPUs here and receiving positive reviews, could price cuts be on the horizon for AMD’s Ryzen 5000 chips?
Last week, electronics retailer Micro Center began offering a huge discount on AMD’s Ryzen 5800X 8-core chip by slashing the original cost from $449 all the way down to $299.
The $150 discount brought the 5800X down to the original price for AMD’s Ryzen $5600x, a less powerful processor with only six CPU cores. As a result, the deal was so good it caused the product to temporarily sell out at Micro Center stores.
For now, the $150 price cut for the 5800X seems to only be available at Micro Center stores, which can only be found in 12 US states. Other retailers such as Amazon and Newegg continue to price the 5800X closer to $386. However, to stay competitive with Intel, AMD might need to discount the Ryzen 5000 series.
Last week, Intel began selling the company’s new “Alder Lake” 12th Generation Core processors, and our reviews show the new CPUs can outperform the latest Ryzen processors. For AMD, the major threat is Intel’s Core i5-12600K processor, a $319 product that can best the Ryzen 5800X on certain benchmarks for both gaming and application processing.
In addition, the new Alder Lake chips are compatible with DDR5 RAM and PCIe Gen 5, although early-adopters will need to pay high prices for the next-generation memory. AMD’s own processors, on the other hand, are a year old, and remain only compatible with DDR4.
For AMD fans looking to upgrade to more advanced technology, the company is preparing to debut a new Ryzen Zen 3 CPU early next year. The upcoming chip will use the existing AM4 motherboard socket, but feature more memory cache for better gaming performance. Later in 2022, AMD then plans on unveiling the Zen 4 architecture for a new generation of Ryzen processors that’ll support DDR5 RAM and PCIe Gen 5.
