cmi86 :
Seriously, why cant intel do this ?
Maybe Intel feels that its brand deserves better pricing? Most people would consider Intel for their PCs and that makes them happy. Majority of people who would be building PCs with budget in mind would settle with AMD.
What would lower priced Intel chips achieve? Would people who have AMD setups switch to Intel, meaning more money spent on new hardware platform? Or would this help with sales going up?
Take a look at share prices of Intel and AMD. Rarely mentioned here, the fact is that AMD has been steadily growing over past year. Intel is still keeping share price similar to three years ago. This fact tells me that Intel has barely anything to keep its company alive, apart from all the hype we can read about performance of CPUs. Would lower cost help selling more CPUs? It would certainly be a short term trend and would cause lower return on investment numbers later on. Hence, hold the price as long as possible. Meanwhile, AMD is surprisingly thriving and putting more chips for desktops, mobile platforms/APU and graphic cards (consoles as well, current and future alike).