In the eve of Barcelona’s debut- AMD’s true quad-core platform- reports are emerging of a potential price cut for the company’s existing line of chips, which long-time competitor Intel should imitate.

The high-end line of processors, the single-core FX 74 with DDR2 support, can now be bought for $599, from the previous price tag of $799, but only when acquired in two-pieces pack. The FX 74 is running at 3GHz but has the same price as the 2.8GHz model, the FX 72. Although very expensive, the FX 62 did not match Intel’s cheaper Core 2 Duo CPUs performance, since the former is built on the 90nm technology, while the latter is using the energy-efficient 60nm technology.

As a result, Intel slowly but strongly regained its desktop market share last year, forcing AMD to eventually cut prices for its product in order to keep up with the competition.

The 4400+ and 4000+ are the new entry-level dual-core processors with prices of $94 ($121 before) and $73 ($104). The list indicates that the 3600+ and 3800+ have been phased out and are not available anymore.

The company also reduced the price of some of its best dual-core processors, the Athlon 64 X2 6000+, which runs at 3.0GHz, fell to $178 from $241 and its AMD 64 X2 5600+, to $157 from $505, according to its latest price list.

Six of AMD’s dual core CPUs can now be bought for less than a grant, while all of the single-core desktop processors have been “degraded” to less than $100. The cheapest models are Athlon 64 3200+ (running at 2GHz and with a price tag of $48) and the Sempron 3200+ (running at 1.8GHz and estimated at $31).

Price for AMD's laptop PC processor line-up remained unchanged.