AMD announced to its distributors that besides the Opteron processor launch, it will also reduce the prices of the current Athlon XP processors. Since Intel unofficially promised to slash the prices on its Pentium 4 chips in April, presumably on the 14^th or something close, the information about AMD lowering its prices comes without any surprises.

At the moment we can tell you very little about the price reduction of the Athlon XP CPUs. We have heard that the price cut will mostly affect higher-end processors, such as Athlon XP 3000+ and others, however, we also expect AMD to slash the prices of its mainstream and lower-end Athlon XP processors as well.

In addition to the Opteron and price reduction, AMD may also launch its Athlon XP "Barton" 3200+ on the 17^th week in order to be able to offer a CPU that costs $500-$600 after the cost of the 3000+ model is lowered.

You can find current official pricing of AMD Athlon XP, Intel Celeron and Intel Pentium 4 processors in February 24, 2003 news-story.