Intel to revamp Core 2 Duo processors on 22 July?
Price cuts on same the day, it seems
Intel's next big round of desktop price cuts will come on 22 July, a day that will see the debut of revamped Core 2 Duo processors and a faster four-core Core 2 Quad, it has been claimed.
A report on Chinese-language site HKEPC, citing motherboard-maker sources, claims the 2.66GHz Core 2 Quad Q6700 will go on sale on 22 July, priced at $530. That's how much Intel is currently charging for the 2.4GHz Q6600, launched last January - its price will fall to $266.
Which is apparently what Intel will ask for the 3GHz Core 2 Duo E6850, its first dual-core chip capable of operating on a 1333MHz frontside bus. It will be joined by the 2.66GHz E6750 and the 2.33GHz E6550, priced at $183 and $163, respectively. All three support all the usual Intel technologies - Virtualisation, SpeedStep, EM64 etc - plus Trusted Execution Technology (TXT), Intel's hardware-based security system.
A version of the E6550 without TXT, the E6540, will also ship on 22 July, the report claims, priced at $163. Also new on the day is the 2.2GHz E4500, a 2MB L2 part that runs on an 800MHz FSB. It will cost $133, forcing the price of the existing E4400 to fall to $113. The E6xxx chips all have 4MB of L2, incidentally.
COMMENTS
Names? Who cares?
Yeah. I used to care. Now I'm reading $266 for a quad core chip and suddenly I don't care any more if they call it the OMG!!P0N13S chip. It's looking good to me.
Names
I hate all the naming schemes they have.
I understand the motivation to stop using clock speed in marketing because there are multiple major brands now and equivalant chips won't usually have equivalent clock speeds - and of course the fact that Core2's clock speeds are much lower than the Pentium IVs they succeed - but at least it was simple for telling the damn things apart.
Oh, so the 700mhz is faster than the 600mhz? And two cores are better than one? Great! That makes sense!
Now it's all E5923QSL and F05050 and MJ420.
The whole AthlonXP 4000, 4200, 4500, etc. routine at least made some sense without throwing around the somewhat misleading clock number routine.
Here we go again
Another round of increasingly confusing Intel product numbers - is anyone else getting sick of it or is it just me?
