Intel single cores speed towards chip gulag

THE ARRIVAL of Conroe and Conroe-L desktop chips in the third quarter signal huge price cuts and many old favourites shuffling off their oh-so-mortal coils, as Intel girds its loins for its next generation microprocessors.

Whole families of chips are headed off for never-never land.

Roadmaps seen by the INQ show that on the 23rd of July Intel will relegate the family known as 6X1 to entry level, with the 661 slashed from $400 to $183 and the 651 from $273 to $163.

The 641 and the 631 will all but disappear, because they will be priced at $163 too. Other members of the 6XX family such as the 670, the 660, the 650, the 640, and the 630 will just slide off the chute like a burial at sea, weighted so they'll never re-surface.

A similar thing is happening to the 5XX family - on the 23rd of July he only surviving members of this 1MB cache family will be the 541, the 531 and the 524, priced at $85, $75 and $69 respectively. The others will just vanish, possibly roaming the planet as ghosts looking to re-incarnate as embedded chips.

The old 3XX Celeron family will also be reduced in price at the end of July, but Intel will intro a new member of that family, the 360 (3.46GHz, 533MHz bus, 512K cache) in September. Pentium Ds will linger on for a few quarters.

Intel will introduce the Conroe-L "value" microprocessor in the second quarter of next year - we must conclude that this princeling will eventually get to wear the ultimately flexible "Celeron" mantle. µ