If you’re an irrepressible tech newshound, you might have heard that prices for Intel processors are going up, particularly the Core CPUs that make up the majority of the company’s business. According to Intel itself, those price increases aren’t happening. The company issued a rare direct refutation of the story, pouring cold water on the red-hot rumor mill.
The story started on a German user forum citing an unconfirmed letter from Intel to retail partners before sprouting alarming stories on European news publications and eventually going worldwide. Said letter claimed that more or less every CPU the company sold at retail would be going up in price in order to fund expanded fabrication facilities and a company restructuring.
This, despite the fact that now would be a disastrous time to double-down on internal investment at the literal cost of retail competitiveness since the PC market is in a protracted and alarming slump. Prices inevitably go up over a long time frame, but if anything market forces are pushing most PC components down at the moment, as you can see with free-falling sticker street prices on SSDs and other components. Intel is also facing some particularly stiff competition from AMD at the moment, especially for high-end chips where the biggest profits are made.
Tom’s Hardware quotes an Intel spokesperson, who said that “we can confirm that Intel has not sent the letter described to customers and partners, and has not initiated a price change to its CPU portfolio at this time.” While it’s certainly possible that Intel plans to raise prices in the long term, the fact that someone deemed it necessary to refute these reports in such direct terms means speaks for itself. Don’t expect to see a portfolio-wide price increase any time soon.
