Intel Q9550 gets 40 percent price cut

Intel unveiled seven new 45nm CPUs today and cut the price of the Core 2 Quad Q9550 from $530 to $316 - that's an impressive 40 percent cut as the chip had to make room for the new $530 Q9650 which is clocked at 3GHz.

The Q9650 is the first mainstream quad-core model clocked at 3GHz and it's quite a bit cheaper than the QX9650 which has identical frequency, L2 cache and FSB but csts $999.

An analogous launch and price drop has happened in the Xeon server CPU range, with the 3 GHz X3370 coming in at $530 and the X3360 dropping by 40 percent from $530 to $316.

The five other new CPUs are as follows, with Q signifying quad, E dual core and X quad Xeon. Apparently the last E is also a Xeon :

Q9400: 6M L2 cache, 2.66 GHz, 1333 MHz FSB, $266
E8600: 6M L2 cache, 3.33 GHz, 1333 MHz FSB, $266
E7300: 3M L2 cache, 2.66 GHz, 1066 MHz FSB, $133
X3330: 6M L2 cache, 2.66 GHz, 1333 MHz FSB, $266
E3120: 6M L2 cache, 3.16 GHz, 1333 MHz FSB, $188

The Q9550 now costs the same as the 2.66 GHz Q9450, while the Q9400 costs the same as the 2.5 GHz Q9300 and 65nm Q6700. Intel now has no less than four desktop processors priced at $266 so we can probably expect at least one to drop off the list soon.

Source: Hexus