Posted 10/30/09 at 09:46:29 AM by Paul Lilly

We've been talking a lot about Acer lately, and that's because Acer has been doing a lot of talking of its own. The OEM's been pounding its chest like Kevin Garnett after an 'and-one' and talking smack to Dell, HP, and anyone else who stands in its way. And now the OEM is saying it's fully prepared to take on HP in a bit of a pricing war, which comes just a day after Acer said it feels confident it will ship 40 million notebooks in 2010.

According to news and rumor site DigiTimes, HP has already kicked off some pretty fierce price competition in a few designated markets, which includes sub-$300 models in the U.S. Acer's ever talkative chairman JT Wang said his company will not only follow suit, but plans to one-up HP by aggressively marketing its netbook and ultra-thin segments, both of which are areas HP is a little weaker in.

Beyond 2010, Wang said the global netbook market is on track to reach 350 million units, and we're a bit surprised Acer didn't say it plans to capture 349 million of them.

Let the price wars begin.

Read More

Posted 06/30/09 at 09:30:00 AM by Paul Lilly

Thanks to fierce competition between two GPU juggernauts and a worldwide economic recession, never has there been a better time for gamers to trade in their scratch for the latest videocard technology from either AMD/ATI or Nvidia. The price to performance ratio is at an all time high, but before we get too spoiled on falling prices for increasingly powerful GPUs, AMD has made it clear that it has no intention of duking it out with Nvidia in a price slashing war.

"Are we interested in winning share by losing money on every GPU we ship? No," said Rick Bergman, AMD's senior vice president. "We're not going to engage in that and we haven't had to."

Bergman's comments came in response to questions about what the chip maker was doing to compete with Nvidia at the low end. But according to Bergman, AMD has been able to entice OEMs with better stability and performance per dollar versus Nvidia's aggressive pricing strategy.

"If you go and look at Dell, HP, or Acer's website, you'll actually see a lot of ATI graphics at the entry level," Bergman added.

Bergman also played off any concerns AMD might have with Intel's upcoming Larrabee, while also adding that in a year from now, AMD will "have something new and exciting," but did not elaborate on what that might be.

Read More