Competition in the semiconductor business can actually drive up costs or lower quality due to design costs. And its all about volume and cashflow. If Intel hiked its prices Intel would go belly up. Plain simple. Remember the first chip cost billions, the next one cost a few $. Higher volume=higher profit until a certain point. And intel had no competition since 2006.
Also the goal of capitalism and competition is monopoly if you really want to go that way. And competition is far from always good, specially when its the race to the bottom.
And lastly, you dont need a new CPU. Intel needs to give you a reason for buying it. Its not like milk or gas you need daily. And without sales, Intel got no cashflow and no profit. And its chapter 11 before you can blink with an eye.
Some people don't seem to understand that.
Intel having competition. IT'S THEMSELVES. Intel needs to put price and value pressure against their own products. As well as ARM and GPUs in other markets.
(There's pretty elastic demand for CPUs. Increase the prices, and volumes drop more than the price goes up by, resulting in an overall reduction in revenue and contribution/margin, meaning Intel gets less money from higher prices, because no one buys their chips, because no one needs to buy their chips, because they already have a fast enough computer. End result? Intel is competing against themselves, they don't need AMD around to have competition).
Or, to use an analogy to illustrate the point, with cars, because everyone loves cars.
Intel = Ford.
They are now the only car manufacturer left, everyone else has gone belly up.
Motorbikes = ARM
Public transport and bicycles = GPUs
Ford can't raise car prices because most people already own cars, and don't need to buy new ones. If they raise prices, people simply just won't buy a new car.
They may also consider buying a motorbike or using other transport because it's better value than the now super expensive cars, and just as viable for their needs (generally speaking of the population of the world as a whole, not some guy who lives in the sticks and has a 2 hour commute because he doesn't want to live near work).
End result, Ford needs to get people to buy new cars in order to stay in business, and even though people need cars, they have cars, and new ones don't offer that much more, so they need an incentive to buy a new car.
Higher prices are not an incentive to buy a new car!
The reason we didn't see much benefit from speeds higher than that on IB was because the graphics hit other bottlenecks at that point due to the weak graphics EUs. If Intel are bulking up the Haswell graphics, they'll need more bandwidth to feed the beefier/more numerous EUs.
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