Over the weekend a trio of new Core 2 CPUs popped up on retailers shelves. With the release of the Core 2 Duo E4400, Intel's Allendale core hit 2.0GHz. The CPU can be found online today for less than $150 at both Newegg and Zipzoomfly. In addition to the new E4400, Intel also quietly released the Core 2 Duo E6420 and the E6320. Like the Core 2 Duo E6400, the E6420 runs at 2.13GHz, only it ships with a 4MB L2 cache, that's twice the amount of memory as the E6400, and both CPUs sell for the same price. The E6320 runs at 1.86GHz and ships with 4MB of L2 cache; it's priced similarly to the E6300.

Along with the new CPUs, Intel is reducing prices on their existing Core 2 CPUs. The 2.66-GHz E6700, Intel's fastest offering in the Core 2 Duo lineup, now costs $316, down 40 percent. Intel also cut the price of its E6600 and E6400 by 29 percent and 18 percent, respectively, to $224 and $183. The E6300 and E4300 were also reduced by 11 and 31 percent, respectively, to $163 and $113.

Intel's Pentium D processors also received a round of cuts. The 3.2-Ghz 935 now costs $84, down 37 percent, while the 925, 915, and 820 were all cut by varying amounts down to an identical price of $74, an indication that all but the 925 will soon be phased out. Isolated cuts were made to Intel's Celeron D and Celeron M Mobile lines. Intel also reduced the price of all of its Xeon uniprocessor server chips by between 9 and 40 percent.

In other news, AMD has announced the "widespread availability" of two new, top-of-the-line Opteron processors. The Opteron 8222 SE and Opteron 2222 SE are both dual-core offerings that are clocked at 3.0GHz with 1MB of cache per core. They're both built on AMD's 90nm process, and they both have a power rating of 119.2W. According to AMD, the Opteron 8222 SE and 2222 SE chips are already available "in several platform configurations today from tier one OEMs." Those OEMs, or system vendors, include the usual suspects: AMD server partners HP, IBM, Sun, and Dell. Official pricing for the Opteron 8222 SE is $2,149 per chip; the Opteron 2222 SE costs $873. The former can work in systems with as many as eight other chips, while the 2222 SE is limited to dual-processor configurations.