[Deustche Bank Conference] AMD's New x86 Core is Zen, WIll Launch WIth K12

[JDG1980]

I honestly can't imagine what they'd do to design a good chip. It can't be as efficient as Intel due to the node difference. It probably won't be wider since that needs a lot of transistors and AMD is constantly cash-starved.

That's a non-sequitur. AMD's GPUs have even more transistors; their financial situation hasn't stopped them from being developed. A wider execution path does mean more die space, but AMD's Piledriver chips already have massive dies and they have to be sold for knock-down prices because they aren't competitive at the high end. If you're going to have a large-die x86 CPU, you need one that has top-end performance so it can sell for a decent price.

It's true that AMD can't match Intel in pure power efficiency, but they can come closer than you think. Remember that Sandy Bridge was on a 32nm process (the same node that AMD has been using since Bulldozer) and that was pretty damn efficient. And they can compete in other ways. If K12/Zen could match or at least approach Haswell in IPC, with energy efficiency similar to Sandy Bridge, that would be very appealing to many enthusiasts if it's cheaper than competing Intel products. It might even help AMD get back in the server business.

 

[MiddleOfTheRoad]

While true, I think the greater concern is that AMD has a killer hardware product selling on stores right now that languishes in near-perpetual underutilization. That product is Kaveri.

So uh, where's the beef?

I think Kaveri was held back by its pricing for most of its existence -- I realize there is a lot of Richland inventory to sell through which is why they were pricing Kaveri stuff at such a premium at launch..... With their recently launched A6/A8 Kaveri chips, they finally hit some more reasonable price points -- so I think sales will improve.

 

[MiddleOfTheRoad]

You completely missed the point.

And Intel helping AMD? Lol, no. Intel has has about million concerns more important than AMD.

Anti-monopoly laws...You should go read them.

Reading comprehension, man..... That's exactly what I just said. Intel has a vested interest in AMD's survival to prevent those Anti-Monopoly laws from kicking in.

 

[MiddleOfTheRoad]

You just can't cut your R&D budget by 25% and expect to develop projects of the same scope as before, and that's exactly what AMD did in the past three years.

You also can't expect a company five times smaller to be able to match Intel's R&D/advancements. So AMD carves out little niches instead and will continue to do it that way. Will AMD ever try to match Intel again at the high end? I'm not sure they are going to try -- they may focus on doing mainstream / midrange offerings from this point forward.

 

[Abwx]

If K12/Zen could match or at least approach Haswell in IPC, with energy efficiency similar to Sandy Bridge, that would be very appealing to many enthusiasts if it's cheaper than competing Intel products.

Haswell has actualy same perf/watt as SB and 10% lower than IB, hence AMD is in a better situation with HW than when they had to compete against its predecessor, if it wasnt for the plateform power hungry chipsets the CPU itself can be quite competitive on perf/watt on MT tasks, as exemples a 4670K has 20% better perf/watt than a 8370E on Fritz and only 10% on two other such chess games and nothing in softs like 7zip where the FX has significantly better perfs.

 

[positivedoppler]

I know what you are saying but this argument doesn't make sense. If a microwave chip costs $.50 what kind of magic sauce is going to make it worth $15 to put it in a microwave. Consumers aren't idiots. If the $15 chip doesn't add enough value nobody will buy it regardless of marketing and appliance makers won't use it. You could have a quantum CPU that has more power than all the computers on earth but if your microwave cost more and didn't do more than I felt it was worth, I wouldn't buy the microwave.

Just playing devil's advocate here but bear with me on this thought experiment. Take two systems A and B. A is a monopoly and B is not. Companies B1, B2, B3, and B4 sell similar products at $2.50, $3.25, $2.25, and $2.70 respectively. Company A (monopoly) sells a similar product to the B companies for $1.50. Irrespective of the fact that system A is a monopoly A has a better price. Monopolies are not necessarily bad, its the fact that companies, when guaranteed of profits reduce expenditures to maximize those profits.

It benefits nobody for intel or any company to take a backseat.


I can't take you seriously when you say Apple is making cheap arm tablets let alone when $69 is in the same sentence. Those tablets are crap that don't work well as soon as you open the box; race to the bottom. In a way apple illustrates the opposite of what you are saying. Only so many people are willing to pay so much for a phone/tablet. Apple's A9 could be as powerful as the 5960X in a 1.5W envelope but if they priced it at $49,999 few would buy it.

@Scholzpdx : At this point in time, intel is competing primarily with itself. Its not going to raise prices because people will stick to legacy. In the history of computing devices, CPUs have never been cheaper.

I was lazy in typing and shortcut my sentence. I don't mean Apple and Qualcomm make $69 tablets, I mean Apple and Qualcomm makes tablets and there are plenty of other makers out there such that decent $69 tablets are now viable option if your needs are simple. I had a $69 Acer Iconia I got from 1sale.com which definitely was not crap. My cell phone made by LG which cost me $109 out the door last year has some generic dual core arm cpu and it plays netflix, skype, internet, gps, camera, video, and andriod games just fine. The tablet/cellphone ecosystem is very healthy and booming without Intel.

Really in the history of computing CPU has never been cheaper? You sure about that. There was a time when both AMD and Cyrix pushed Intel and you can spend a little over $100 for a Celeron and get near the top PII 450mhz like performance. There was a time in which a $79 750mhz Duron from AMD overclocked to 1ghz.

 

[frozentundra123456]

You just made the point that cpus are cheaper than ever. Let's look at that 1 ghz duron for 80.00. Today for less than 80.00 you can get the Pentium 3258 which will easily clock to 4times that speed, plus the Pentium has twice the cores, much higher ipc, and a pretty decent igp. Wow at least 10x the performance per dollar, not even counting inflation.

 

[Abwx]

You just made the point that cpus are cheaper than ever. Let's look at that 1 ghz duron for 80.00. .

How much for such a CPU before K7 line was released.??.

Remember the price of a Pentium II or even the lowish celerons just two years ago.?..

At under $200 there is no way you can go wrong with the Celeron 300A.

by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 31, 1998

http://www.anandtech.com/show/174/5

The conclusion is obviously straightforward....

 

[TurtleCrusher]

Or even a J1900 or A4-5000 motherboard/CPU combo for $80 shipped to your door. Either of those systems will do practically everything you'd want besides serious gaming.

Heck, my roomates have the A4-5000 in a laptop and it can even play NBA 2K14 with the settings turned down at native res. That was a $200 laptop with Windows 8.1. Adjusted for inflation, could you even have purchased a laptop for $139 in 1999? I really doubt it.

 

[Enigmoid]

I was lazy in typing and shortcut my sentence. I don't mean Apple and Qualcomm make $69 tablets, I mean Apple and Qualcomm makes tablets and there are plenty of other makers out there such that decent $69 tablets are now viable option if your needs are simple. I had a $69 Acer Iconia I got from 1sale.com which definitely was not crap. My cell phone made by LG which cost me $109 out the door last year has some generic dual core arm cpu and it plays netflix, skype, internet, gps, camera, video, and andriod games just fine. The tablet/cellphone ecosystem is very healthy and booming without Intel.

Really in the history of computing CPU has never been cheaper? You sure about that. There was a time when both AMD and Cyrix pushed Intel and you can spend a little over $100 for a Celeron and get near the top PII 450mhz like performance. There was a time in which a $79 750mhz Duron from AMD overclocked to 1ghz.

They are generally crap when you compare them to the higher end. They are usable but perhaps not pleasantly so (much depends on the specific model and driver/OS support). I have a dual core A9 phone and it does everyone OK but hands down my brother's S800 phone is miles better.

I'm positive when you take inflation into account. The duron 750 (assuming you mean that chip launched at $181 according to wiki). The G3258 overclocks just as well and costs $70. Not to mention that all the associated costs have come down.

Haswell has actualy same perf/watt as SB and 10% lower than IB, hence AMD is in a better situation with HW than when they had to compete against its predecessor, if it wasnt for the plateform power hungry chipsets the CPU itself can be quite competitive on perf/watt on MT tasks, as exemples a 4670K has 20% better perf/watt than a 8370E on Fritz and only 10% on two other such chess games and nothing in softs like 7zip where the FX has significantly better perfs.

This is crazy. Looking it up however, it appears to be true. However in a lot of other tasks.

In some tasks HW is a little worse than IVB but its never worse than SB. IB is much more than 10% more efficient.

If you want to eliminate the chipset compare to mobile. 35W piledriver cannot compete with the 35W dual cores let alone the 35W intel quads. The CPU is horrible in perf/watt no matter how you slice it. A 4700mq is capable of running at 3.2 ghz in a 45W envelope and utterly shames any stock desktop CPU. The fact that there is no competition at the 15W power level shows it all.

I thought we said fritz was a poor benchmark given the extremely low scaling between successive CPU generations.

 

[positivedoppler]

You just made the point that cpus are cheaper than ever. Let's look at that 1 ghz duron for 80.00. Today for less than 80.00 you can get the Pentium 3258 which will easily clock to 4times that speed, plus the Pentium has twice the cores, much higher ipc, and a pretty decent igp. Wow at least 10x the performance per dollar, not even counting inflation.

That Duron was almost 14 years ago. If you follow Moores Law, do we have 64 times more performance now with the Pentium?

 

[positivedoppler]

They are generally crap when you compare them to the higher end. They are usable but perhaps not pleasantly so (much depends on the specific model and driver/OS support). I have a dual core A9 phone and it does everyone OK but hands down my brother's S800 phone is miles better.

I'm positive when you take inflation into account. The duron 750 (assuming you mean that chip launched at $181 according to wiki). The G3258 overclocks just as well and costs $70. Not to mention that all the associated costs have come down.



This is crazy. Looking it up however, it appears to be true. However in a lot of other tasks.

In some tasks HW is a little worse than IVB but its never worse than SB. IB is much more than 10% more efficient.

If you want to eliminate the chipset compare to mobile. 35W piledriver cannot compete with the 35W dual cores let alone the 35W intel quads. The CPU is horrible in perf/watt no matter how you slice it. A 4700mq is capable of running at 3.2 ghz in a 45W envelope and utterly shames any stock desktop CPU. The fact that there is no competition at the 15W power level shows it all.

I thought we said fritz was a poor benchmark given the extremely low scaling between successive CPU generations.

For all the task I need to do on my tablet. Andriod games(angry birds), pictures, skype, internet, video, netflix both my generic LG and my 3 year old Acer Iconia has been plenty good. I don't view it as crap performance, I view it as getting amazing value for the price. The 7" version which somebody stole from me perform about the same. 3 year old technology in a cheap tablet, can't complain.

I bought my first Duron a little under a year after it was released for $69 or $79 I can't remember. But the price dropped fast on it. It probably had something to do with competition. I also remember toying with the idea of dropping $500 for a 1 Ghz Thunderbird, but given the pencil overclock trick of the Duron and how it could be had for dirt cheap, the Thunderbird wasn't even an option. I think the 1 Ghz dropped to $3-400 really quick also. Intel PIII at the time was a bit more than the top of the line Thunderbird and was getting spanked by the tbird in most of the benchmarks. It was a real golden age for cpu enthusiast. AMD and Intel just trade blows and continue to cut prices very aggressively and rapidly with the top of the line cpu soon after launch. I don't think we'll ever see that again unless Intel sees some competition.

Kind of like how AMD and Nvidia are trading blows and dropping prices right now.

 

[Abwx]

This is crazy. Looking it up however, it appears to be true. However in a lot of other tasks.
In some tasks HW is a little worse than IVB but its never worse than SB. IB is much more than 10% more efficient.

Techreport power efficency graph is based on their updated X264 encoder that takes advantage of AVX2 for 20% better perfs than IB, that s a very favourable case for HW, their other X264 bench that is not using AVX2 would show quite different numbers for SB in respect of HW.

There s softs that are better than Fritz, particularly Houdini wich see 19% improvement (and Stockfish to a lesser extent) over IB but FX also get a boost to the point that its perf/watt is even closer than in Fritz, in Winrar or 7zip the FX8370E has better perf/watt than said 4670K.

Edit :

They use this graph and bench for their perfs/watt :

Not this one :

http://techreport.com/review/26996/amd-fx-8370e-processor-reviewed/5

 

[Arachnotronic]

That Duron was almost 14 years ago. If you follow Moores Law, do we have 64 times more performance now with the Pentium?

Moore's Law says nothing about the performance of a chip.

 

[cbn]

Intel doesn't sell game console chips

Maybe they should make the change and start selling something suitable for that market.

Take for example, Rockchip which is trying to press the tablet SOC RK3288 into gaming console service:



Offer Rockchip (and others like Rockchip) something much better than what they are using now in order to increase future x86 distribution. (Certainly Intel has the means to make this sustainable too.)

EDIT: Maybe if Rockchip proves itself with integrating SoFIA, Intel could grant them access to big core IP with special limitations. (eg, Rockchip must build the big core IP in Intel fabs. Perhaps the big core IP could be limited to certain configurations?) I actually think a 1C/2T big core dedicated die with fast clocks would be very interesting provided the volume and distribution were great enough. A extremely cheap Star Craft II and classic game console chip and web browser machine that would allow Rockchip users a capability they do not have with four little cores at low clockspeed.

 

[frozentundra123456]

For all the task I need to do on my tablet. Andriod games(angry birds), pictures, skype, internet, video, netflix both my generic LG and my 3 year old Acer Iconia has been plenty good. I don't view it as crap performance, I view it as getting amazing value for the price. The 7" version which somebody stole from me perform about the same. 3 year old technology in a cheap tablet, can't complain.

I bought my first Duron a little under a year after it was released for $69 or $79 I can't remember. But the price dropped fast on it. It probably had something to do with competition. I also remember toying with the idea of dropping $500 for a 1 Ghz Thunderbird, but given the pencil overclock trick of the Duron and how it could be had for dirt cheap, the Thunderbird wasn't even an option. I think the 1 Ghz dropped to $3-400 really quick also. Intel PIII at the time was a bit more than the top of the line Thunderbird and was getting spanked by the tbird in most of the benchmarks. It was a real golden age for cpu enthusiast. AMD and Intel just trade blows and continue to cut prices very aggressively and rapidly with the top of the line cpu soon after launch. I don't think we'll ever see that again unless Intel sees some competition.

Kind of like how AMD and Nvidia are trading blows and dropping prices right now.

Maybe there is something wrong with mine that I have never discovered, but I have an Acer Iconia tablet, 7 inch, A100, and it is an absolute POS. I cannot describe how frustrating it is to use. You can have a cup of coffee while a web page loads, that is if it can find the wi-fi signal at all and doesnt time out in the middle of loading. Too slow to even play Bejewelled Blitz on facebook. It has caused so much frustration that I have made a promise to myself to never buy another android tablet. Saying its performance is crap would be generous. I was complaining to someone at work about the performance, and they said "well it must have great battery life". No, not really, 4 hours at best which is atrocious for such a low powered device.

 

[Meghan54]

Reading comprehension, man..... That's exactly what I just said. Intel has a vested interest in AMD's survival to prevent those Anti-Monopoly laws from kicking in.

And exactly what antitrust (the correct term, not anti-monopoly) law(s) would kick in against Intel if AMD disappeared tomorrow?

Not all monopolies are broken up nor illegal, btw. The courts have long upheld this. The 1920 antitrust case vs. U.S. Steel is one instance in which the govt. allowed that monopoly to stand while others were broken up at the same time.

In fact, in approving the breakup of the Standard Oil Company (the de facto poster boy for antitrust in most people's minds), the Supreme Court added the "rule of reason": not all big companies, and not all monopolies, are evil; and the courts (not the executive branch) are to make that decision.


And I do enjoy reading all the "if AMD disappears tomorrow, Intel will triple prices!" drivel that spews out in these types of threads....utter drivel, at best. Exactly who would be paying $200 for the cheapest Intel cpu?

The answer would be no one outside businesses, and that would very negatively effect Intel's margins and profits....something shareholders wouldn't cotton to very much.

Intel's biggest competitor right now is itself. It's created the expectation of faster, cheaper, smaller cpus over the decades. Now imagine prices doubling/tripling for its products and guess what would happen to overall sales figures. Doesn't take a Rhodes Scholar to figure that one out....or maybe it does.

 

[TurtleCrusher]

And exactly what antitrust (the correct term, not anti-monopoly) law(s) would kick in against Intel if AMD disappeared tomorrow?

Not all monopolies are broken up nor illegal, btw. The courts have long upheld this. The 1920 antitrust case vs. U.S. Steel is one instance in which the govt. allowed that monopoly to stand while others were broken up at the same time.

In fact, in approving the breakup of the Standard Oil Company (the de facto poster boy for antitrust in most people's minds), the Supreme Court added the "rule of reason": not all big companies, and not all monopolies, are evil; and the courts (not the executive branch) are to make that decision.


And I do enjoy reading all the "if AMD disappears tomorrow, Intel will triple prices!" drivel that spews out in these types of threads....utter drivel, at best. Exactly who would be paying $200 for the cheapest Intel cpu?

The answer would be no one outside businesses, and that would very negatively effect Intel's margins and profits....something shareholders wouldn't cotton to very much.

Intel's biggest competitor right now is itself. It's created the expectation of faster, cheaper, smaller cpus over the decades. Now imagine prices doubling/tripling for its products and guess what would happen to overall sales figures. Doesn't take a Rhodes Scholar to figure that one out....or maybe it does.

It wouldn't be immediate, but every single CPU release would increase in price 15-20% and before you know it the prices doubled, tripled and so forth. Yes, regular people would be paying $200 for the cheapest CPU. If you have no other option to use your office, productivity or gaming x86 applications, you'd simply have no other choice.

Inevitably motherboards, video cards, hard drives and laptop input devices do fail, and practically no one would rebuild their system from used parts on craigslist or eBay. They'd have to buy new again. Intel's number one priority is to generate sustainable profit for their shareholders, and they adjust their prices to the highest the market will bear. You must be in some fantasy land where Intel is a non-profit.

 

[ShintaiDK]

That Duron was almost 14 years ago. If you follow Moores Law, do we have 64 times more performance now with the Pentium?

Moores Law is not about performance.

 

[krumme]

You just can't cut your R&D budget by 25% and expect to develop projects of the same scope as before, and that's exactly what AMD did in the past three years.

Its completely unfounded nonsense. Where does it say they develop with the same scope as before? - you are the only one saying it. Its completely bs, - ofcource they dont, and it shows in the financial results and stock price. As you say yourself:

"They axed their server/FX line up, they castrated their APU line up with DDR3 only solutions, they didn't try to break into the mobile market... "

In a contracting pc market, with a bad expensive BD arch produced on the worst foundry with a Mubadala contrack around their neck, they never the less stabilized the company.

Contrary to what you predicted years ago. The same doom all over. And the fact is - as shown in the rising stock price - excactly the oposite.

 

[mrmt]

You also can't expect a company five times smaller to be able to match Intel's R&D/advancements. So AMD carves out little niches instead and will continue to do it that way. Will AMD ever try to match Intel again at the high end? I'm not sure they are going to try -- they may focus on doing mainstream / midrange offerings from this point forward.

That used to be the case years ago when Intel had some market brackets left unattended, or attended with a very inadequate product, but what niche today isn't being addressed by Intel with a very targeted product? That's why we are seeing AMD management complain about Intel aggressiveness in conference with investors, and they have been consistently losing share even in traditional strongholds for them like the bottom end of the notebook market.

Btw, that's the reason for the embedded/semi-custom push. It's a market with returns far below what Intel is used to get, so in theory a market that Intel shouldn't chase for a while.

 

[mrmt]

Its completely unfounded nonsense. Where does it say they develop with the same scope as before? - you are the only one saying it. Its completely bs, - ofcource they dont, and it shows in the financial results and stock price. As you say yourself:

You asked about resource starving. Cutting R&D budget is an indication of R&D starving.

Contrary to what you predicted years ago. The same doom all over. And the fact is - as shown in the rising stock price - excactly the oposite.

Rising stock price compared to what? To the 1.something when Rory and his team couldn't get a sales forecast right? Yes, that's rising, but that's far from the $8 levels Rory had when he assumed the company.

 

[krumme]

I think you have realism confused with anti-AMD sentiment.

We have been hearing for years (since BD) how BD was going to blow everyone away, how HSA was going to take off, how the APU would reign supreme, how Piledriver and Steamroller will fix all of Bulldozer's flaws, how kaveri would bring 20% IPC increase and demolish everything based on LibreOffice HSA tests, how mantle would blow DX away, how the cat cores were going into tablets, how hUMA and HSA would usher in a new era of computing, how freesync would be awesome, and how OpenCL and compute was/is going to displace CUDA and/or become important to the average consumer.

Most of that didn't pan out (BD, PD, SR, HSA/hUMA, Kaveri 20% IPC, jaguar tablets, freesync - still MIA and unknown variable refersh, Lano-> Trinity-> Richland -> Kaveri the cost went up for top model, APUs still don't get more perf/$ than a pentium + 260X combo, etc). Some did (mantle seems to have merit despite caveats and OpenCL is gaining dominance) but much didn't. Some is still to be determined.

Much was also said about how intel's graphics were going to surpass AMD's, how Haswell was going to be a major jump, how intel would stay on their tick-tock schedule, how intel would be dominating in tablets and phones by now, the pumped up projections of Sofia, Mooresfield, Merrifield, how CT would massively increase graphics over BT due to having 4x EUs, etc.

Some of that didn't occur. Sofia, Moorsefield, Merrifield are massively behind schedule if they are going to be released. 14nm was delayed and tick-tock looks to be permanently off schedule. CT looks only to have 2x GPU gain over BT (measured using Egypt HD). Though Iris Pro is good, the regular GT2 graphics are still lagging behind Kaveri.

However, intel has also delivered a lot as well. Massive efficiency gains in servers. Massive increase in performance and/or battery life for mobile devices. Greatly improved graphics drivers and hardware (SB couldn't even do texture filtering properly, Haswell can't do AA efficiently but is much improved). At least positive progression in performance (PII x4 980 does better in applications vs the 7850k).

http://www.hardware.fr/articles/913-7/cpu-performances-applicatives.html

Now broadwell is being showcased and being hyped (IMO quite a bit).

My point is that AMD hasn't really delivered much on the CPU front in the last few years. The GPU division is solid but the company is floundering and barely making a profit.

Personally I have never seen the 8xxx series CPUs near $100. Your way of thinking is admirable but a company selling a product at such low margins is a company that is not doing well. You could simply say that the product is so bad they have to sell it so cheap because if they sold it at the price they wanted (8150 for $245) nobody would buy it.

I like AMD and I wish them well but nothing about that CPU division screams that they are going to rise like a phoenix out of the ashes (certainly possible for them to pull a conroe but unlikely given the small R&D budget). I certainly have interest in the financial health of AMD, intel, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Samsung, etc. If they go broke, they don't produce any more products for me to buy.

Its very fine to always go for value but don't be penny wise pound foolish. Its fine to believe in value but value is meaningless without some base of quality, for the same reason why I never buy the really cheap toilet paper.

I kind of agree. But who are the ones beliewing all the post BD designs would save AMD and PR about HSA whould do the rest? - its a strawman argument imo.

There is a reason Meyers was Kicked, replaced by a cowboy, and Keller, Lisa and the rest was hired years ago. If anyone beliewed BD design would help it definitively wasnt inside AMD. They are way past that.

Lisa have delivered in spades, it remains to be seen what Keller can do. And if he succeeds if it actually matters within the Mubadala contruction. I wouldnt expect any miracles here, or anything that resembles it, and it seems the professional investors think the same. Whatever Keller does, Intel will not do a P5, and IBM will not suddenly have a freaking good new SOI++ 14nm process ready that GF easily adopts H1 2016. There is a better chance of getting hit by a giant meteor.

 

[krumme]

You asked about resource starving. Cutting R&D budget is an indication of R&D starving.

Rising stock price compared to what? To the 1.something when Rory and his team couldn't get a sales forecast right? Yes, that's rising, but that's far from the $8 levels Rory had when he assumed the company.

Ressources is as you say a combination of budget and scope. And we know nothing about the scope. Yes it looks starved looking from the outside, especially because of the software burden as you say, but the devil is in deep complexity, and there is nothing we can know about that. Look how fast the K12 is comming. It shows the scope compared to BD is quite smaller - perhaps a magnitude.

And yes RR did some fuckups at the start because he thought he knew something about the business - eg. trying to sell gfx more expensive as NV comes to mind as one of the more funny. But when Meyers left AMD was a overrated company. Nobody really knew how bad BD arch was, but most of all - as i wrote back then - the small profit during many years of Meyers was nothing but Lipstick, caried through by fantacy valuation. Amd was in a far worse situation than what the results appeared then. IMO RR took the big hit for it, because its not something that can continue for many years.

 

[krumme]

The funny thing is that it is that despite Intel bleeding AMD dry in a price war, you and others think AMD is responsible for the low CPU prices. If CPU prices are that low today, that's because of Intel and Intel alone, not AMD. AMD would rise its prices if it could, but since the line up is obsolete/weak, they simply cannot charge too much money.

We completely agree here - Intel define the prices. And the primary reason is not product but who have most cash. If there is something that help to drive business its to have more money than your competitors. Its killer weapon nr 1 - you can crush your opponent all over the line with it