Whenever I see someone make a statement like that about $1200 quads they clearly don't understand how the market works.
Amd hasn't had anything competitive with Intel for quite a few years now so why aren't quads already at $1200???
If you can explain that you will know why that statement makes no sense.
AMD hasn't had anything competitive in the upper tier of the desktop/server segment, yes, but not competitive at all? Er...
Imo, under $200 the best chip to get would be a 960T and considering it's on sale often for $110 it's an amazing bargain. Which brings me to my point:
AMD combats the performance gap with more attractive prices. Until SB hit the gap wasn't really that large and many many gaming rigs were built on Phenom II's for a reason and that's because of the awesome bang-for-your-buck. AMD's AM3 platform was a better buy for performancet-to-price when compared to 1156 from top to bottom.
Bulldozer was a horrendous miss on the performance front but even worse is that the chips are priced too high and you get people making statements like the one you made above while completely neglecting recent history. It's different now, though, absolutely. But it's different because of Bulldozer and Sandy Bridge and not Deneb/Nehalem.
It's going to be interesting to see how Intel prices their future chips. AMD has walked away from the high end desktop arena and focusing less on the desktop in general, but it's also at a time where a chip like the 2500K offers more than you could ever want or need as far as computing goes. They're price adjustments will depend on both their previous gen chips as well as the lesser demand and need for super fast super awesome CPUs. Remember, it was the gaming community that drove a lot of that progress and innovation but now we're more GPU-centric and not a growing market compared to mobile
