SemiAccurate has been warning that Intel is slashing prices to OEMs for months now, something that is now official. The sheer magnitude of these cuts to MSRP is simply staggering, the actual ASP drops are larger.

Remember when we said that AMD’s Rome CPU absolutely destroyed anything Intel had on price and performance? With the top line 64-core Eypc 7742 priced at $6950 mostly delivering a multiple of the performance of the top line 28-core Xeon at $10,009, (Note: Add $7879 if you want to get to 75% of the memory capacity of the Epyc, up from <50% with the $10,009 version) something had to give.

So Intel slashed prices, and by slashed we mean far more than 50%, but the MSRP didn’t change. Officially there was no change, that pipsqueak AMD has no effect on pricing, carry on folks and look away. Unofficially if you showed your friendly OEM a bid with an AMD CPU there were enough MeetComp dollars flowing to drop prices 2/3rds or more. That said on the high end Intel likely could not price their wares against AMD without selling at a loss. No we were not joking, it was really that bad.

That brings us to today with the new Cascade Lake-R (-R is for ‘Refresh) line of CPUs, 14 SKUs in total. With them Intel is making the whisper numbers official and gutting prices. When SemiAccurate says gutting, we aren’t talking 5, 10, or even 15%, we are talking a rollback. This is not a fight anymore, it is Intel in desperate retreat. More interesting is what effect these changes will have on capacity constraints and margins, the changes are far deeper than they look on paper if you get the underlying tech.

Note: The following is analysis for professional level subscribers only.

Disclosures: Charlie Demerjian and Stone Arch Networking Services, Inc. have no consulting relationships, investment relationships, or hold any investment positions with any of the companies mentioned in this report.