Intel yesterday pared back its price list, chopping up to 34.1 per cent of what it charges for its top-end Xeon DP processors.

The cuts affect Xeons with 2MB of L2 cache - essentially the CPUs derived from the Pentium 4 6xx family. The four processors are clocked at 3, 3.2, 3.4 and 3.6GHz, and all have an 800MHz frontside bus.

Until yesterday, the four chips were priced at $316, $455, $690 and $851, respectively. Today, they will set OEMs back $256, $316, $455 and $690.

The absence now of a CPU at the top price-grade suggests the upcoming launch of a 3.8GHz Xeon DP.

As we were first to report (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/09/08/xeon_amd64_fix/) last week, Intel will be upgrading its Xeon DP cores in November with tweaked versions that add a pair of EM64T instructions missing from the instruction set architecture to date, but present in AMD's AMD64 64-bit technology. ®

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