AMD is planning to charge up to 15 per cent less for certain Sempron processors from early next month.

So claim those ever chatty sources from Taiwan's motherboard manufacturer community, as cited by DigiTimes.

The price cuts will apparently be applied to Socket 754 Semprons, to make them even more attractive purchases when compared to Socket A versions. Of course, Socket 754 Semprons are already the cheaper of the two, coming in a couple of dollars below equivalently clocked Socket A parts.

If the sources are correct, AMD's customers don't care and continue to order Socket A parts. AMD wants to shift production to its 64-bit architecture, from which the Socket 754 Semprons are derived despite being restricted to 32-bit processing.

AMD's roadmap calls for the introduction of 90nm Semprons - codenamed 'Palermo' - sometime this quarter, so it's likely the suggested price cuts will pave the way for this debut as much as anything else. The public roadmap suggests AMD plans to phase out the Socket A parts by the end of the quarter, in any case, which is surely a better way of shifting demand to Socket 754 than making the latter processors cheaper? ®

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