Round Rock (TX) - For AMD's planned price drop for its dual-core processors to enable the company to regain its aggressive price/performance competitive position against Intel as it has promised, the company would have to reduce its existing Athlon 64 X2 and Athlon FX prices by between 38% and 56% for its various models, with cuts averaging about 51%. This estimate is based on a comprehensive price/performance review of Intel's soon-to-be-released Core 2 Extreme and Core 2 Duo processors, along with its existing Pentium D dual-core line, pitted against AMD's FX-62, FX-60, and Athlon 64 X2 processors in Tom's Hardware Guide tests.

Intel recently declassified its own plans to reduce dual-core Pentium D prices as soon as this upcoming Sunday afternoon, just prior to launching its new, top-of-the-line Core 2 Extreme CPU at a price at or below the street price of AMD's current flagship Athlon FX-62. Since that time, multiple sources have obtained what appears to be a leaked table of information showing AMD is planning to slash prices for certain dual-core processors, including FX-62, by as much as half on Monday morning. UPDATE: AMD spokesperson Damon Muzny declined to confirm or deny the accuracy of this table, though he confirmed once again price cuts are forthcoming.

If the table is indeed accurate, then AMD could very well make a legitimate claim to the price/performance lead, perhaps for the first time in the dual-core category.

According to the table of Intel's projected price cuts received by TG Daily, distributors' cost for the highest-level performer in its older product line, the NetBurst-oriented, dual-core Pentium D 960, could drop to $316 when sold in 1000-unit quantities. Street prices for the 960 today average $550, according to data provided to TG Daily today by PriceGrabber. Today, AMD's top-of-the-line Athlon FX-62 has an average street price of $1,018, according to PriceGrabber, although in recent Tom's Hardware Guide tests, it performed about as well as Intel's Pentium D 950. The distributors' cost for that particular model is expected to drop next week to $224 - today it sells for about $330 on average.

Two days ago, TG Daily examined claims that, based on general performance data, AMD would have to slash prices by as much as 70% to regain the price/performance crown. Using general performance data supplied by PCMark05 benchmark tests conducted by Tom's Hardware Guide, it appeared from our initial examination that AMD would actually have to destroy the price floor for its dual-core products, plunging prices by as much as 83%.

But PCMark05 is not an accurate measurement of performance for graphics and large-scale memory operations, especially in the gaming categories where AMD processors generally excel. To make a fairer projection, TG Daily constructed a mathematical performance model taking five categories of workload into account: general number-crunching, everyday applications, gaming, audio streaming, and video streaming. This was harder than we thought it would be: To make this model bullet-proof, we needed a series of complete benchmarks that would triangulate modern processors' performance against an old CPU that could serve as a reliable index.

For the "index" processor, we chose a Pentium 4 2 GHz model, which appears at or near the bottom of Tom's Hardware Guide's current "Mother of All Performance Charts" as a sort of baseline. Quite conveniently, PriceGrabber projects the average sale price for a P4 2 GHz unit at $100, although much higher-performing processors are available for substantively less, especially from AMD.

We needed five benchmarks that represented performance in our chosen categories, and for which data was available for not only all the dual-core processors likely to be affected by price changes next week, but the Pentium 4 index CPU as well. We were a bit surprised to find that complete data is hard to come by for all tests, especially since the nature of the tests change to take higher performance levels into account. So we had to choose the benchmarks that stretched the furthest distance, if you will, between old and new processors.