Intel is apparently overcharging its customers more than never as AMD is not able to successfully compete in the $200 to $1000 price range. Despite having lower manufacturing costs than AMD, Intel is not willing to lower the prices even when new CPUs enter the market.
The lack of competition has made Intel richer and the company is not even paying attention to the customers as it sometimes used to.
They are changing the sockets as often as possible, the upgrades are delayed for more than 12 months (see LGA2011 roadmap) and the quality of the products is actually getting lower as Intel has decided to use sub-par thermal interface material (TIM) underneath the integrated heat spreader (IHS) of the new Ivy Bridge processors.
Hardware experts from TechReport.com have
analyzed the situation and came up with some very interesting graphics.
Our take is that, despite the fact that
AMD’s solutions offer more performance for the money in their respective market sectors, Intel’s marketing and monopolistic tactics are depriving the Texas-based CPU designer of decent sales.
AMD is on a rebound with the newly launched Trinity processors that we presented
here and the company’s main foundry,
GlobalFoundries seems to have a very good manufacturing process that should improve the situation, but we don’t know if this will be enough for Intel to reach with lower prices.
Intel has managed to keep 80% of the x86 market for 7 years in a row when AMD had the absolute performance superiority, between 1999 and 2007.
Of course, that implied a lot of strong-arming of the OEMs, bribes and other monopolistic tactics, but now that
AMD is actually lacking this x86 performance superiority, a sudden change is unfortunately unlikely to occur.
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