Intel has announced a slashing of the prices for 20 older processors in its lineup by as much as 48 percent. Furthermore, the company launched several new, low-power chips. Intel lowered the prices for its 2.83 GHz Core 2 Quad Q9550 part from $316 to $266, a 16 percent price cut. Furthermore, the chip giant also dropped the price on the 3.0 GHz Q9650 by 40 percent, taking the top part in the Core 2 Quad family from $530 down to $316.

Other price cuts were received by the 2.66 GHz Q9400, the 2.50 GHz Q8300 and the Q8200. It's not yet sure if Intel's price cuts have anything to do with the company's own inventory or due to some pressure from the well-received new Phenom II desktop processors from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). It's clear that in the current economic conditions, better deals on older products are more than welcome.

For now, Intel's newest family of processors, the first three Nehalem-class Core i7 chips released last November, continue to be priced at their initial levels, including $999 for the 3.20GHz Core i7-965 Extreme Edition. The top quad-core part from the older Core 2 architecture, the 3.2GHz Core 2 Extreme QX9775, is still the most expensive workstation chip in Intel's stable, at $1,499.

Intel also cut prices for two Core 2 Duo parts, several Pentium and Celeron chips and the top four Xeon server processors in its X3000 series for 1p servers. The company has suffered a 19-percent sequential drop in revenues for the just-concluded financial quarter, and is projecting a continuation of that trend in the current three-month period, according to executives.