Here we are, some eight months after Intel’s Sandy Bridge CPUs debuted, and the price of most of those chips hasn’t budged. Intel has, in the past, cut prices every so often, either to make room for new chips with higher clock speeds or to keep pace with AMD discounts. Sandy Bridge hasn’t seen much competition from the AMD camp, though, and we’ve yet to see anything replace the Core i7-2600K at the top of the line.
According to CPU World, Intel does have some Sandy Bridge price cuts in the cards. Come September, The Core i7-2600S and the Core i5-2500T, 2500S, 2405S, 2400S, and 2390T will see their prices drop by 2-6%—small change, in other words. More substantial price cuts are purportedly slated for October, when the Core i3-2120 and a couple of Pentiums will be discounted by 13-15%. Look out, Llano.
Sadly, the most appealing CPUs for enthusiasts, the fully unlocked Core i5-2500K and i7-2600K, appear set to hold the line on pricing. That’s a little surprising given the (hopefully) imminent debut of Bulldozer-based desktop chips from AMD, which will surely include similarly unlocked derivatives. We don’t yet know how Bulldozer will perform, of course. Perhaps Intel has more insight on how much of a threat the upcoming FX processors will be.