TECHNOLOGY & TELECOMMUNICATIONS

Intel Seen Cutting Pentium Chip Prices: The company, seeking to keep rivals at bay, is expected to cut prices of its top-of-the-line Pentium chips as much as 25% in the second half of the year. For consumers, that means lower prices on fancy personal computer systems in time for Christmas. Intel Corp.’s microprocessors are the brains inside an estimated 75% of the world’s PCs. The cuts come as Intel seeks to present Pentium as the standard chip for PCs, aggressively cutting into the market of companies that make clones of Intel’s previous-generation 486 chips. It’s also trying to ward off competitive threats to Pentium from PowerPC, a chip developed jointly by Motorola Inc., International Business Machines Corp. and Apple Computer Inc. Some analysts said the cuts could be even deeper--as much as 45%.