You do realize that is a third party seller (even if it is 'fulfilled by Amazon')? This happens all the time on Amazon when Amazon itself doesn't have any stock. Same thing with Newegg's auto-gouger.
That's precisely the point I made - it's supply vs. demand, not inflation. Amazon has no units in stock, which results in 3rd party suppliers filling in those orders. Yesterday, one 3rd party supplier had at least 17 in stock @ $454.99 when I posted. Today, those are all sold out and Amazon algorithm picks the next (high rated) supplier for product fulfillment,
not necessarily the cheapest supplier. Stating that Intel excess demand or shortage of supply are the primary issues are both correct. The reasons for supply constraint is what we don't know - is it yield, wafer capacity, fab capacity, failure to order enough wafers initially, etc. We don't know but it doesn't matter for us as consumers. We just want reasonable prices.
What's the price today?
$474.99 from a 3rd party, until Amazon has its own inventory restocking on November 25, 2015. You have limited supply and when the supply runs out, 3rd parties step in and because they know there is limited supply, they opportunistically raise prices. The only way for prices to fall is for more inventory to be supplied around MSRP. This is the exact definition of supply & demand, not inflation.
Same reason i5 6600K is at least
$280 on Amazon. That means either of two scenarios: Intel has failed to estimate demand correctly and didn't provide enough inventory to meet the quantity demanded OR they are having supply issues which means inventory is allocated based on other criteria such as profit margins, OEM contracts, etc. not necessarily quantity demanded. For example, since Amazon is such a large wholesaler in the Internet sales space, it has far higher bargaining power to ask for lower prices from Intel than some other players. It may not be advantageous for Intel to supply the most chips to Amazon since they may have the lowest profit margins with that company. With production shortage, strategic supply re-allocation to align with other goals (winning new customers, attaining highest profitability, etc.) could be one explanation but not the only one.
What really sets a bad precedent is that those $455 i7 6700K all sold out anyway. Hopefully the situation goes back to normal sooner than later because we wouldn't want Intel to get any ideas that a $450 quad-core i7 is somehow still a great value.
What stock?
Its rather a higher than expected demand.
It would be almost trivial to separate the supply from demand here as they are inter-related. If you have higher demand but cannot meet the quantity demand, you are
supply-constrained.
'There will be a major shortage of Skylake CPUs until end of November'
"Intel announced the full boxed retail launch at IFA last week, with the company saying the processors "deliver some of the most significant advancements in computing that we've ever seen". Intel has been generally quiet on the stock shortages, though a spokesperson previously told Kitguru: "We are experiencing supply tightness due to strong demand and expect additional volume to be available as Q3 progresses." However, PCR understands that the new Skylake processors - particularly the higher-end i7-6700K - won't be ready available until Q4.
"Intel doesn't have as many 6700k as they want, so it's in major shortage, and is predicted to be so until the end of November," a senior distribution source told PCR."
If supply was a worldwide issue, we'd see shortages outside of North America. Sounds like someone just did a very poor job of estimating the demand for K series in North America but we cannot completely rule out a supply constraint as well. The end result is in Europe the i7 6700K is sitting on the shelves since there is excess inventory but in the US there isn't enough inventory. Logistically it would be too expensive to suddenly ship the excess inventory from Europe to North America. Either way it's not conclusive that there are yield/fab-wide supply issues or we'd see worldwide shortages that mimic Nintendo's Wii. It could also be a supply (logistics) issue because if 100 chips leave the factory, the chips intended for North America could take much longer to arrive from a logistics stand-point than the ones intended for Asia, Middle-East and Europe. On paper, the allocated supply could meet the demand, but with added logistics time, the excess quantity demanded would become greater than the initial quantity supplied after accounting for the logistics delay. Of course that's why someone would be in charge of re-allocating the inventory accordingly. At the same time if the inventory turn-over is very quick in Europe, if Intel were to re-assign more supply from Europe to US, they'd become supply constrained in Europe. That's why Intel needs to produce more chips.
You still haven't documented the design costs. And $1B is nothing compared to the process tech R&D cost anyway. So your claim that the design costs are so high that they'll wreck cost/transistor reduction benefits of Moore's law for Intel's desktop CPUs turned out to be incorrect.
He has been claiming the above for 3.5+ years now since NV doubled the prices of GPUs during Kepler generation. It's his way of justifying how mid-range $499 680 and $549 980 are reasonably priced for consumers. And if Intel drops the 8-core 6900K for $599-699, his theories will be even more undermined.
All we need to do is just look at Intel's and NV's historical market pricing and their current product pricing to prove his statements wrong. NV increased its gross margins nearly 45% from 38% to 55% range since 2009. Intel's gross margins is even better,
63-65%. Higher manufacturing costs is just PR BS used to justify higher prices (or how prices stay relatively the same while more transistors are allocated towards the iGPU some of us don't want at all, when instead they could be used to add more cores - thank you HEDT) you hear from Intel/NV equity holders or direct/indirect employees of these firms who have vested interest in the success of these firms.