Intel may reduce prices for its processors in 2020

Intel hasn't had the best year in 2019, with AMD rail-roading Team Blue's consumer desktop chips across multiple metrics. AMD's 7nm based Ryzen 3 processors offered more cores than their Intel counterparts while charging customers lower than what Intel was asking for. Additionally, thanks to the higher core/thread count, AMD's processors started to show Intel up on various workloads. Intel still commands the advantage when it comes to single-threaded loads and even gaming to some extent, but it has not been enough to stop AMD quickly eating into Intel's share of the desktop processor market. Intel might be readying to counter AMD with a revised price strategy through 2020.

According to a report by DigiTimes, Intel may be considering a price reduction for all its chips in 2020. However, the price cut could be rolled out in phases, with OEMs being the first ones to receive Intel's chips at a lower price. The report of Intel offering lowered prices to OEMs might happen sometime in the second half of 2020. However, there is no way to be sure that OEMs would actually pass on the benefit of cheaper Intel processors onto the consumers.

It should be noted that there is some merit to Intel's alleged price reduction plans. Last year when Intel announced its 10th generation Core X HEDT processors, they were almost 50 percent cheaper than their predecessors. So Intel is not completely closed off to the idea of lowering the price of its chips. However, a question worth asking is why would Intel offer cheaper processors to OEMs before consumers? One of the biggest endorsement for AMD's popularity in the last year has been the fact that retailers have had a hard time maintaining stock of various Ryzen 3 SKUs. OEMs haven't been raving about the notable value for money offered by Ryzen, but actual end-consumers who've bought the processors off the shelf and built systems with them.

Even if Intel manages to price their processors the same as AMD's counterparts, there's still the challenge of the price-to-performance proposition.  AMD has pretty much perfected the art of offering more bang for the buck, so Intel may have a bit of an uphill battle there. But if the contemplations are indeed true, it would mean great news for those who are Intel loyalists, and at the end of the day, it is the consumers who win.