Right after all the consumers get their new personal computers for Christmas holidays, Intel Corporation is likely to review its chipsets pricing on the 28^th of December this year. The price-cut is expected to be in-line with Intel’s traditional quarterly changes in core-logic pricing.

The costs of some products from i865-series and i845-series will decline by $1 or $2, changes in i875P pricing are not anticipated by the sources.

Take a look at the table representing past, present and future pricing of Intel’s chipsets:

The i875P continues to be the highest-performing Intel chipset and the company does not want to make it cheaper due to its exclusive top position in the family. At the same time, Intel lowers the pricing of its other chipset products because there is some market pressure on the parts from companies like VIA, SiS and ATI.

We may anticipate Intel’s traditional core-logic price-cut in late March, but there is no information about further declines in chipset costs, as in the second quarter of next year Intel is launching its totally new platform products – Alderwood and Grantsdale – supporting PCI Express bus, LGA775 processors as well as DDR-II SDRAM memory. Keeping in mind industry’s intention to transit to PCI Express platform as soon as possible, I am not sure about prospects of current chipsets for mainboards.