Intel this weekend pruned its processor prices, making a series of cuts to its Celeron lines and a handful of other CPUs, according to its public price list, which was updated yesterday - the same day in which arch-rival AMD also tweaked what it charges for chips.

Intel's Celeron D adjustments saw 8-22 per cent knocked off the price of the budget desktop CPUs, which now cost no more than $69 a pop when bought in batches of 1,000 chips. The company also added the 3.06GHz Celeron D 347 to the line up. It has 512KB of L2 cache, hence single-digit model number improvement over the otherwise identically specced - and priced - 346. The 346 is a 90nm part while the 347 is fabbed at 65nm.

Intel also added the 65nm Celeron M 440 and 450 - clocked at 1.86GHz and 2GHz, respectively - to its list, and cut the prices of the 430 and 420 by 36 per cent and 20 per cent, respectively.

The price list update also included the ten per cent knocked off the price of the low-voltage Core Duo L2400. The Pentiums 915 and 820 saw their prices reduced by 15 per cent and 18 per cent, respectively.

Intel's next bout of activity is expected next month when it launches its first quad-core part, the Core 2 Extreme QX6700 - aka 'Kentsfield' - followed early in the New Year by the Core 2 Quad Q6600.

Core 2 Duo-derived Pentium processors are expected to debut in the same quarter. Further Core 2 Duo chips are scheduled to ship in Q2. ®