clock for clock the new prices of the dual cores make their quad cores look like a complete ripoff. in what world does it make since to charge 3 times the money for 2 more cores. IMO the quad core of the same speed should never be more than just under twice the price of the dual core.

I remember the E6300 being at $185 'list' pricing with actual vendors selling at just about that price.

Imagine 1.83 Ghz/2Mb cache/1066 Bus almost exactly 2 years ago set you back that much money. And I remember AMD howling that it was priced too cheap. The E6300 was the processor that singlehandedly pushed Athlon X2 to the 'value processor' segment.

Now The E8500 is in that present $$$ spot...3.16 Ghz (1.33 Ghz faster - over 40%)/bigger cache/faster bus/SSE4/45nm/SSE4. Holy cow.

I was expecting more drastic cuts including the 45 nm quad (q9300 and the rest ), the q6600 is at end of live this year . If 45 quads doest sell this year , when they are selling?
Intel did a bad move with this price cuts, in 4 months Nehalem will arrive at $284 with more power then any 45 quad .How will buy this 45 quads?

Would an 8500 be a better CPU than my current Q6600? I have it O/C'd at 3.1, anything above that it gets unstable.

No price drop for the Q9300? dang.

You can get E8500 for $193 from ZZF

http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=10007605

Hard hitting prices. AMD can't win'em all.

Hard to believe that a couple of years ago the Q6600 was selling for like $400 and up. Now its the budget quad to have. Price drops are awesome.

Correction: The E8500 actually goes for $199.99 at Newegg as of the time of this post (not $209.99 as the article mentions).

I've seen the Q6600 for $179 at both Fry's and Microcenter in the past month or so.