Intel Corp., the world’s largest maker of chips, has silently published its new price-list, which reflects the most recent changes in pricing of the company’s microprocessors. Apparently, the Pentium D and Celeron D products faced massive price slashes and some of the prices turn out to be really aggressive.

The dual-core Intel Pentium D 950 processor (3.40GHz, 4MB cache, 800MHz processor system bus) experienced the most notable price-drop – 50% – and now costs $316. The rest of the Pentium D 900 family also faced significant price reductions – from 13% to 43%, which resulted in very aggressive prices on the Pentium D 940, 930 and 920 chips - $216, $209 and $209 respectively in 1000-unit quantities. Meanwhile the most recent update for the family – Pentium D 960 – is priced at $523.

By contrast, prices on AMD Athlon 64 X2 processors with two cores begin at $303 and rise up to $645, which means that the Pentium D 950, 940 and 930 are priced very aggressively against the rivals. While in the majority of tasks the Pentium D 930 ($209) is approximately inline with the Athlon 64 X2 3800+ ($303) in terms of performance, the latter offers users some advantages in games, some other applications and also has lower thermals, which means overall quieter computer.

Intel Celeron D processors are now also priced at lower levels compared to AMD Sempron chips: the former are quoted in $54 to $79 range, prices of the latter begin at $64 and rise up to $120.

Intel did not comment on the reasons for such massive price slashes on its high-end and mainstream and entry-level chips, but a wish to recapture market share from the arch-rival AMD as well as necessity to popularize the dual-core processors before the launch of the new micro-architecture this summer are likely to be obvious motives.

Intel Corp. did not comment on the news-story.