People always compare P2 to i7 because having the best chip matters. You are able to charge a premium because there is no competition if you are in Intel's position today, and AMD's a while ago. That allows you to cut prices on your lower products if you want to. A company like AMD can make money only if Intel lets it by not cutting prices on their Core2 and CoreQuads too much. That being said, AMD hasn't made money for years. Companies can only survive so long without making mone
I agree with you on the overclocking part though. Mostly irrelevant to the 98% of people who don't overclock or don't want to (like at work, imagine if you screwed up the company's computer by some stupid overclocking. That would be a terrible way to get fired). Overclocking is important in that it shows potential. The more you can overclock, the more likely that the company will be able to increase stock speeds.
As for a monopoly, remember that one of the great tricks when you have a monopoly is to reduce choice. Why give people a choice at every price point? Figure out your manufacturing costs and pump out 3 CPUs, one for the high end performance user who has money, force him to pay. One for the middle of the road guy, give him a little more speed than he needs and charge him for it. Make one for the poor bastard who must go cheap. Make sure that CPU is a last generation piece of crap so that he'll be motivated to upgrade once he figures out how to earn some money.
That was Intel's strategy with the 486-50, 486-33, and 486-25 though the low end was really the 386 after the 486 was released. The price of a 486-50 was ridiculous for the gains it got over the 486-33.
The monopoly prices were high enough for me to buy a K6-2, which worked well enough for the price though the K6-2s from AMD weren't all that good compared to Pentium. I hope you guys buy AMD, they need it and I have no idea what AMD is doing cutting GPU prices so low. Don't they want to make money? Do they want to bleed to death? You'd think after losing so much blood, they'd stop exchanging blows with their enemy and retreat to allow both sides to rest a while. AMD = suicide!