One of the most significant price drops affects Intel’s flagship 128-core Xeon 6980P, which has been reduced from $17,800 to $12,460—a staggering $5,340 price cut. Other cuts include the 96-core Xeon 6952P, now priced at $9,115 (down from $11,400), and the high-performance 72-core Xeon 6960P, which drops from $13,750 to $9,625. These changes make the Xeon 6 lineup more attractive to server OEMs and cloud service providers (CSPs), particularly those mindful of per-core pricing—a critical factor for software licensing costs in large-scale deployments.
The timing of these price cuts is telling. AMD’s EPYC ‘Turin” processors have been making waves thanks to their strong performance and competitive pricing. AMD’s recent climb to nearly 25% market share in the data center CPU market—a level not seen since the Opteron era of the mid-2000s—has likely raised alarms at Intel. By slashing prices, Intel is clearly aiming to slow AMD’s momentum while giving its Xeon lineup a stronger value proposition against EPYC processors, which were already putting pressure on Xeon in both performance and cost-per-core metrics.
It’s important to note that the listed price reductions are based on Intel’s 1000-unit Recommended Customer Pricing (RCP). In practice, server OEMs and CSPs typically negotiate their own deals with chip manufacturers, so the real-world pricing dynamics might differ. However, the sharp reductions in RCP suggest that Intel’s Xeon 6 family may not have been meeting sell-through expectations, prompting the company to make a bold adjustment to spark renewed interest from enterprise buyers.
Intel’s aggressive pricing strategy now places Xeon 6 processors at or below AMD’s EPYC chips on a per-core basis in many configurations. This could be a crucial differentiator as customers weigh their options for scaling workloads, especially in environments where licensing costs hinge on the number of cores. While AMD may (or may not) still have the performance crown in some benchmarks, Intel’s new pricing strategy might give budget-conscious data centers a reason to reconsider the Xeon lineup.
This shake-up in the server CPU market will undoubtedly be closely watched as the competition between Intel and AMD continues to smolder. For now, Intel’s price cuts signal a renewed determination to compete in a market that is becoming increasingly challenged by AMD’s innovations and growing market share. The question is whether these reductions will be enough to hold the line against AMD’s relentless rise—or whether Intel will need to do even more to secure its dominant position in the data center.