Intel announces 40% drop in prices across the board for its Quad-core offerings.

On Monday, Intel announced price cuts across their wide range of chips used in mobile and desktop PCs, including a drop of up to 40 percent for its premiere 45nm quad-core chips.

Intel’s Core 2 Quad Q9650 processor is now priced at US$316, a 40 percent drop since December. Other Core 2 Quad chip prices were cut between 14 percent and 20 percent. These quad-core chips are used in high-end gaming desktops systems and certain workstations.

Analysts say that Intel’s move could be a response to increasing price pressure exerted by rival Advanced Micro Devices, which recently announced the Phenom II quad-core chips for high-end desktops. AMD has priced its Phenom II quad-core chips competitively between $235 and $275.

Intel Xeon prices have also dropped in recent weeks perhaps following AMD’s announcement of the new 45nm Opteron “Shanghai” chips released earlier this month. The new chips feature an increased L3 cache to 6MB, 4-cores ranging from 2.3GHz for their 2376 chip to 2.67GHz for their top of the line 2384 Opteron.

Intel also cut prices of its flagship Xeon line of processors for servers as well as Celeron processors for mobile devices by up to 48 percent. The quad-core Xeon 3370 is now priced at $316, a 40 percent drop from December, while the Celeron 570 chip was cut by 48 percent from $134 to $70.

Intel also introduced three power-efficient quad-core chips with the “s” moniker. The Core 2 Quad Q9550s processor includes 12MB of L2 cache, runs at 2.83GHz and draws 65 watts of power. The chips are priced at $369. The chip is power-efficient version of the Core 2 Quad Q9550 chip, which draws 95 watts of power.

Intel also introduced the Core 2 Quad Q9400s processor, which runs at 2.66GHz, and the Core 2 Quad Q8200s, which runs at 2.33GHz. This chips are priced at $320 and $245 respectively.

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