Advanced Micro Devices on Monday officially reduced prices of its desktop microprocessors, making dual-core chips available at less than $100 price-points and reducing the price of its top-of-the-range offerings from $999 to $799. The price-cut may boost interest towards AMD’s microprocessors, but the fierce price war with Intel reduces both chipmakers’ profits.

The furious competition from Intel’s Extreme processor series has forced AMD to start selling two Athlon 64 FX microprocessors for $999, the price-point of one former top-of-the-range offering, and now the firm had to reduce the price-tag on its fastest desktop solution that consists of two AMD Athlon 64 FX-74 chips by 20% to $799. In addition, AMD removed AMD Athlon 64 FX-70 and FX-62 central processing units from its price-list, leaving only two processor bundles – FX-72 and FX-74 – in the family.

AMD’s dual-core Athlon 64 X2 family also faced significant price slashes from 23% to 48%, making the fastest desktop processor from the company – AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+  – to cost $241. The least expensive dual-core chips from AMD – Athlon 64 X2 4000+, X2 3800+ and X2 3600+ – now cost $104, $83 and $72 in 1000-unit quantities, making two processing engines from AMD available in value segment.

The family of single-core processors from Advanced Micro Devices also became tangibly more affordable after the price-slash. The most advanced single-core chip, Athlon 64 4000+, by AMD now costs $92, whereas the cheapest, Sempron 3000+, is available at $31 in 1000-unit quantities.

At the new price-points price-performance ratio of AMD Athlon 64 X2 processors looks better, in some cases, when compared to Intel Core 2 Duo. Considering that in a lot of cases mainboards for AMD’s chips are sold at lower price-points compared to similar motherboards for Intel’s central processing units, AMD’s Athlon 64 X2 lineup may gain additional popularity primarily among system integrators.