[citation][nom]rdawise[/nom]. It is still higher than AMD which is carving itself a nice little niche in the "bargain CPU" market (almost like the Wal-mart of CPUs, expect the cash flow).[/citation]
Honestly, I don't see the point. The cheapest i7 is much faster then the fastest AMD, at less than 100 bucks more, then considering that a quality mobo to suit the AMD chip is not all that less expensive then a decent mid-level i7 mobo, it just doesn't make sense to me to want an AMD chip, unless you already have the mobo and only want to pay for an upgrade.
I spent past few weeks playing around with mobo/memory/cpu combos for both AM2/AM3 and i7 set ups, and best I could do was an AMD set up about 150-200 bucks cheaper than an i7 setup. But in that same aspect, you get what you pay for, and the AMD set up would still have been far slower then an i7 setup.
In the end, I wanted to go back to AMD, because I was a huge fan of them back in the day with their K7 series and I think they are a great company that doesn't gouge their customers. But sadly I couldn't find any reason price/performance wise to go with AMD this year.
Maybe AMD can get back in the game in a year or 2.