AMD is said to be preparing a broad range of deep price cuts in a bid to take the fight to Intel's next-generation architecture Core 2 processors, due to be released in the coming months. AMD will cut its prices by up to 46 per cent, it has been claimed.

Industry sources cited by DigiTimes reckon the cuts will come on 24 July. The reductions - of 0.5 per cent to 46.1 per cent; 36.7 per cent off on average - will come to all the Socket AM2 and some Socket 939 Athlon 64 X2 dual-core processors and follow the aggressive pruning of Socket 939 and Socket 754 parts.

Some Socket AM2 chips will be dropped too, it seems. Out will go those with 2MB of L2 cache - 1MB per core - which would appear to confirm rumours that AMD plans to limit Athlon 64 X2 chips to 1MB of L2 (512KB per core). It is expected the upcoming Opteron 12xx, 22xx and 82xx lines will get 2MB of on-die cache.

Intel is also expected shortly to make big price reductions, knocking up to 60 per cent off the price of its current CPUs. The cuts are due on 23 July. ®