Shortly after Intel released the Alder Lake series of processors, the price of the AMD Ryzen 5000 processor was said to have been heavily discounted at a number of retailers.
Reported by Techspot, Wednesday (11/10/2021), PC component retailer MicroCenter is discounting the price of a number of AMD Ryzen 5000 (Vermeer) series. The biggest discount is on the Ryzen 7 5800X, which drops to USD 299 or USD 150 off.
Meanwhile Ryzen 9 5950X, a 16-core CPU that was previously priced at USD 799 is now priced at USD 699. For mainstream series such as the Ryzen 5 5600X, there is also a discount, but the pieces are smaller. That is down from USD 299 to USD 279.
Keep in mind, not all retailers provide the same discount. In fact, there are also those who do not provide discounts at all, such as a number of retailers in Europe. Other PC component retailers such as Newegg also provide discounts, but not as significant as at MicroCenter.
Maybe this step was taken because AMD is starting to feel pressure from Intel's Alder Lake line of processors. Especially the non-K Core i5 series which costs under USD 300, such as the i5-12400F which is reportedly going to be the 'king' in the budget class at a price of USD 160.
Although AMD still has another advantage, because the Ryzen 5000 still uses an AM4 motherboard which is available and priced better than the LGA 1700 motherboard needed to run Alder Lake.
This discount may be one way for AMD to stay competitive with Intel until they release the Ryzen 6000 in 2022.
The 12th generation Intel Core Alder Lake chips are officially announced. There are six new chips presented, all bringing performance improvements over the previous generation.
Initially there were three models to be released, namely the Core i9-12900K, Core i7-12700K, and Core i5-12600K. Then there will be 'KF' versions of each of these chips that don't carry an integrated GPU.
Despite having high performance, there are quite a lot of games that are not compatible with this new processor. According to Intel this is due to a Digital Rights Management (DRM) issue, which recognizes efficient cores in Alder Lake (E-cores) as a distinct system. This will prevent the game from launching, or if it does, the game will crash while playing.