Intel Cuts Chip Prices While AMD Grooms Bobcat

Intel has announced a slew of price cuts on more than half a dozen of its processors.The steepest cut is on the chip maker's desktop Core 2 Duo E8500 (3.16 GHz), from $266 to $183 -- a 31 percent reduction. Other savings are for the desktop Core 2 Duo E7200 (2.53 GHz), from $133 to $113; the quad-core Q6600 (2.4 GHz), from $224 to $193; the desktop Core 2 Duo E8400 (3.00 GHz), from $183 to $163; the X3220 (2.40 GHz) and X3210 (2.13 GHz) Xeon server processors, from $224 to $198; and the E3110 (3.00 GHz), from $188 to $167.

Meanwhile, AMD has confirmed plans to take on Intel's Atom chip with Bobcat, a single-core, 64-bit processor for low-cost mobile devices and subnotebooks. The chip is likely to replace AMD?s low-power Geode x86 system-on-chip. The company hasn't revealed a release date or pricing info.CNET, TMCnet