San Francisco, Oct 28: Intel Corp., the world's largest maker of semiconductors, has cut the prices of its Pentium 4 and lower-cost Celeron processors for both PCs and laptops. The price of the fastest Pentium 4 PC chip, at 3.2 gigahertz, is now $417, down 35 per cent from $637. The price of the 2.4 gigahertz Celeron for PCs is now $69, down 13 per cent from $79.

The price of the fastest mobile version of the Pentium 4 was cut by 34 per cent to $433 from $653, while the fastest Celeron for notebooks is now $134, down 10 per cent from $149. Intel regularly lowers the prices of chips to sell off inventory and make way for newer products. The cuts, announced on Sunday, generally translate into price reductions of PCs because microprocessors represent a significant per centage of the cost of new computers. Bureau Report