Over the weekend, Intel made a few price adjustments to its microprocessor lineup, with the largest cut being made to its E8500 Core 2 Duo processor.

That chip, the fastest (3.16-GHz) Core 2 Duo processor that Intel sells, was trimmed 31 percent to $183. Intel also cut the price of the E8400 (a 3.00-GHz version) to the same $183 price point -- when Intel does that, it's a signal that the E8400 will be soon phased out in favor of the faster processor. Intel also created a bit of a logjam at the low end of the family by slicing the E7200 13 percent to $113, the same price as the E4600 and E4500, which run slower and only have 2 Mbytes of level-2 cache.

The cuts to the Core 2 Duo line are simply Intel making a bit of headroom for its Core 2 Quad lineup; the slowest processor in that product family, the 2.4-GHz Q6600, was reduced by a scant 14 percent to $193.

Intel also made a few minor reductions to the price of its Xeon processors.