This is kind of an odd little article over at The Inquirer: an AMD Senior Vice President, Rick Bergman, claims that they “WILL NOT engage Nvidia in a price slashing war.”  Uhhh, maybe I am dreaming, but I think that war is already on and in fact it was AMD that started it.

“Are we interested in winning share by losing money on every GPU we ship? No,” Bergman said. “We’re not going to engage in that and we haven’t had to.”

Bergman maintained that, on a “sustained basis”, AMD is actually doing quite well at the lower end of the graphics market, noting, “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 that in the last quarter, AMD had pretty good market share when it came to graphics, smiling acidly as he remarked, “we even made some money. And obviously our competitor [Nvidia] lost a lot of money.” Ouch.

Perhaps Mr. Bergman forgot that it was the introduction of the Radeon HD 4850 and HD 4870, that strongly undercut NVIDIA’s price/performance on already existing parts, that really started this race to the prices we are at today for discrete graphics cards.  That FORCED NVIDIA to drop its prices and then AMD did it again, a few times!  They released the HD 4670, then the HD 4830 and even the HD 4770, all of which forced NVIDIA’s hand to lower prices.

AMD VP claims no price war, forgets it started it - Graphics Cards 2
This guy was really the start of the latest AMD/NVIDIA price war

Of course, AMD was also pushing prices down by continuing to drop prices on cards like the Radeon HD 4850 – they even essentially made their own HD 4770 irrelevant. 

Now, at PC Perspective, we are as big of fans as low prices as anyone else, but we do see the potential down side to these two guys continuing to undercut each other: low to no profits.  Obviously that can lead to even worse things like one of the companies dropping off the map.