Maintaining the pressure
There was never any chance that Intel would ease up on the pressure following AMD’s announcement of another big quarterly loss and Intel’s most recent round of desktop CPU price cuts confirms that.
The chip giant’s latest price list doesn’t show too many price cuts, but those it has cut make its desktop offering even more competitive.
It cut the price of one of its most popular quad core processors – the Q6600 – by 16 percent last April and it’s chopped another 14 percent off it today, meaning it can now be bought for $193.
That’s the only quad core cut, but Intel’s dropping the price of its top-end Core 2 Duo processor – the E8500 – by 31 percent from $266 to $183. The next model down – the E8400 – drops 11 percent to $163 and the price of the lower end E7200 drops 15 percent to $113.
The only other price cuts were of three Xeon server processors. The X3220 and X3210 both drop 12 percent to $198 and the price of the E3110 goes down 11 percent to $167.