Ignore the Timing, AMD's News is Huge

As the Test Center's Brian Sheinberg reports in his review, AMD is delivering to market CPUs, 3.0GHz X4 945 and the 3.2GHz Black Edition X4 955, that could spark a new round of competition in desktop pricing in ways we haven't seen in a while.

The Black Edition X4 955 is priced at $245, a fraction of the price of PC processors in the same ballpark from Intel. While Intel has been simply dominant for the past two years in both engineering and execution, and its latest Nehalem processors for servers are the most powerful we've ever seen, AMD's latest Black Edition CPU has all the earmarks of a game-changer for system builders and their customers. The AMD pricing scheme on the new chips will invite many into the world of screamingly high performance that otherwise would have had to wait a year or two until Intel pricing dropped.

Here's how AMD does it, according to Sheinberg's review:

Getting the most out of a PC's hardware profile will be key to getting the most out of Windows Vista, Windows 7 when it ships, or even Linux for that matter.

Headlines today may be spread out among other stories, but keep an eye on AMD and its latest PC processors and technology during the coming weeks and months. Keep an eye on Intel, too, and how they may respond.