Intel takes ax to Pentium 4, Itanium prices

Intel slashed prices across its Pentium 4 and Itanium product lines Sunday as it prepares for its biannual developer conference in San Francisco at the beginning of September.

Intel slashed prices across its Pentium 4 and Itanium product lines Sunday as it prepares for its biannual developer conference in San Francisco at the beginning of September.

Intel usually cuts prices in the weeks before the introduction of a new product to make room at the top of its pricing structure for the new products. The company’s chips are generally priced according to a sliding schedule, with new product introductions bumping older chips down a pricing scale.

The fastest Pentium 4 processor currently available, the Pentium 4 560 processor, now costs $417 in quantities of 1,000 units. This is a 34.5% cut from its previous price of $637. Other Pentium 4 processors based on Intel’s new LGA775 (land grid array) packaging were also cut by anywhere from 33% to 18%, and Pentium 4 chips based on the company’s older packaging technology saw similar price cuts.

Celeron D and Celeron prices decreased on Sunday anywhere from 12% to 6.7%. The Celeron brand name is used for cut-down versions of the Pentium 4 chip that feature about half the cache of their more powerful cousins. The Celeron D brand represents the 90-nanometer version, and the most expensive Celeron D chip, the Celeron D 335, now costs $103, down from $117.

Intel left alone prices on its Pentium M processor, but cut the prices for the Mobile Intel Pentium 4 processor, a desktop-replacement chip. The most powerful chip in that lineup, the Mobile Intel Pentium 4 538 processor, now costs $234, down from $294.

The company also cut prices on several Itanium 2 processors. The most expensive Itanium 2 processors were left alone but the 1.4-GHz processor with 4M bytes of Level 3 cache now costs $1,980, down from $2,247. The 1.3-GHz chip with 3M bytes of Level 3 cache now costs $910, down from $1,338. Intel also cut prices on the 1.4-GHz chip with 3M bytes of Level 3 cache, the 1.4-GHz chip with 1.5M bytes of Level 3 cache, and the low-power 1-GHz chip with 1.5M bytes of Level 3 cache.

The Intel Developer Forum has traditionally been used by the company to introduce new products or to provide updates to its product strategy. This year’s conference will be closely watched as Intel has yet to provide specific details about the next generation of its Pentium 4 and Xeon processors since it ripped up its road maps in May and canceled two future products.

The company has spoken about its plans to move to dual-core designs for desktop, server and notebook processors in 2005, but it has not said what type of architecture those chips will have.