Intel plans to retire four quad-cores and it plans to issue product discontinuance notice in Q4 2009 and to announce End of Life for them in Q1 2010. It wants to retire the Q9400, a 2.66GHz clocked 45nm quad-core with 6MB of L2 cache, as well as its Q9400S low power version.

It won’t need its services as of Q1 2010, as it will have plenty of Lynnfield CPUs to chose from and if you still want to stick to socket 775 platform Q9550, Q9650 and Q9300 will be waiting for you to buy them, as Intel doesn’t plans to kill them anytime soon.

Intel also plans to release product discontinuance notice for Core 2 Quad Q8200 clocked at 2.33GHz and selling for a modest $163 as well for its low power brother Core 2 Quad Q8200S that is currently selling for $213 but at this point, Intel hasn’t released its end of life plans for these two.

Socket 775 and Core 2 Quad and Duo will be selling through 2010 and probably a good part of 2011, so there is nothing to worry about.