Just one CPU drops £200 with Intel under little pressure to reduce prices

You can always tell how a company is doing by the price moves it makes on its products. All things being equal, the only time you reduce prices is when you (a) have produced too much or (b) not sold enough. Business 101.

KitGuru hears more rumours than most. Fortunately we have enough grey hair to filter the grit from the gold. Over the past week there have been a lot of rumours in the channel that Intel was on a slash-n-burn mission with a whole range of products. The last time this happened was at the end of the socket 775 processors, with several hundred pounds being sliced off the Q9650 etc.

Sources close to Otellini have indicated that, this time,  there is only one chip for the chop.

Anyone planning to buy a Core i7 950 should expect to see £200 off the street price before the end of this month.

In truth, this cut will affect very few enthusiasts. The 950 is, more than anything, a speed binned Core i7 930. Since most of the 920/930 processors clock like crazy anyway, having a 950 instead is unlikely to add more than a couple of hundred megahertz to your final assembly.

KitGuru says: With AMD's Phenom II X6 1090T selling between £220 and £250, there is nothing in the market competing with the Core i7 950 processor – expect Intel's own chips. With a whopping 34% increase in sales last quarter, Intel must be selling through almost everything it can make. It will be interesting to see IDC's updated market data shortly to see how the Intel/AMD battle is going. With just the one serious price movement from Intel this summer, there just isn't enough pressure being applied by AMD's processor engineering team.

Heated debate below – considered conversation in the KitGuru forums

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