There are other ways Intel is ripping you off, you just haven't been paying attention. Instead of raising prices, they are giving you less die space, (i.e., less performance than what should have been).
When Intel thought AMD was still competitive, Nehalem/Lynnfield had ~ 300mm^2 die sizes. That was 2008-2009 before they knew how terrible Bulldozer was. Since then AMD has been falling behind and Intel has been selling us less performance than it normally would have. When Pentium 4 added HT, and Athlon 64 slaughtered it, Intel was giving away HT for "free". There was no $100 premium for Pentium 4 HT chips during that era. Intel couldn't possibly be able to afford that. Now they charge $100 for basically just that and 100mhz more in the 3770K. :thumbsdown:
Also, we have had Q6600 quad-core for $300 or so around August 2007 (that's when I got mine for $300 CDN). Fast forward
6 years later and Intel will continue to sell Haswell for $300 as yet another quad-core. Now you may say that most programs don't benefit from quad-cores so why would Intel make Haswell a hexa-core for $300? Well they do sell 3930-3960 for $500-1000. There you go. If AMD was competitive, there is no way Intel would have been able to pull that off. They'd have to sell a hexa-core for $300. So we are already suffering believe it or not. Based on that graph above, Intel had no problem selling me a 300mm^2 Core i7 860 for $330. So where is my $330 Hexa-core 300mm^2 Haswell? I bet it'll be again $500+.....
Not trying to be a salesmen, but there is a legitimate way to help AMD stay in business. Instead of wasting $ on their CPUs, buy their GPUs instead. Unlike throwing $ at their slow CPUs you don't really give up GPU performance, make $ bitcoin mining on the side, and boy AMD GPUs in double precision distributed computing projects make NV cards look like prehistoric dinosaurs. I looked at your DC production the other day (164,919 BOINC points per week), it's weak! A single HD6950 would make more than that in MilkyWay@Home in
1 day! For you it could be almost a no brainer unless you must stay attached to your specific DC projects (Folding@H, Seti@H). Otherwise, you'd get a card that pays for itself and when mining fails, you still have a card that crushes NV cards in DC points. You could then still use the CPU for some of those DC project that don't benefit much from GPU speed in the first place.