Intel definitely likes your money folks!
My guess, and just a wild guess is.....There are quite a few people that purchased a 5960X, at least I can't ever recall seeing a greater number of people opting to go with the "Extreme Edition" or top of their consumer line ~$1000 CPU. I wonder if they didn't take the above average sales as a prompt to see if they could push that "luxury" up in price and see if people would still bite? Thing is though, this was the first time the "EE" chip made sense to me (and probably to a lot of the other purchasers), you actually got something very tangible in return for the price hike above the other chips. In the past the big chip may have been simply clocked higher or had more cache. Now the 980X did indeed have more cores than the lower priced chips but that was back when virtually nothing would take advantage of the additional cores, in fact many programs/games hadn't even started taking advantage of quad cores yet.
I'm of the opinion that most people are going to balk at this drastic price increase, we've all kind of gotten used to the top end being roughly $1000, the addition of two cores to the line with the 5960X didn't cause a large price bump and the six cores fell in price, I don't see why similar didn't happen here. Maybe if the sales of this fall sharply from what they saw with the 5960X we might see the SL-E top chip pricing return to near traditional levels. I don't plan to buy one, I would have at 5960X prices, but quite frankly I don't even have a real "need" for eight cores, it's just a "want". Now, if it turns out these are miraculous wonder chips that average 5GHz OC's, I take that back....I'll probably get one.
You're missing one very important thing about the 980X and that is tangibly higher achievable clocks and much better energy efficiency all due to the node shrink to 32nm the last one which enabled much higher clocks. Not to mention the unlocked multiplier. In my opinion all of that made it more attractive over the non-extreme counterparts than 5960X. That is of course until the release of the 970 which made the extreme series an expensive extravaganza.
It's not about cost of anything it's about corporate greed, Intel is cutting on everything, they been decreasing the product quality steadily for the past few years, first the slim heatsinks, than TIMs, than only aluminum heatsinks, than even worse TIMs, than thinner PCBs, than job cuts etc while prices going up every new generation. I am really not happy with the situation, although these 2011 CPUs are high end, they are still consumer CPUs mostly for home and office use, charging 1700 for 10 cores of Haswell-E copycat is ridiculous in every aspect. Seems the clouds are darkening over Intel again after 10 years or so.... and their R&D budget. With lower volumes, and a same or increasing R&D budget, I would assume that prices would go up.
Then again, they just reduced their cost base, by axing all of those jobs too, so shouldn't prices go down?
It's not about cost of anything it's about corporate greed, Intel is cutting on everything, they been decreasing the product quality steadily for the past few years, first the slim heatsinks, than TIMs, than only aluminum heatsinks, than even worse TIMs, than thinner PCBs, than job cuts etc while prices going up every new generation. I am really not happy with the situation, although these 2011 CPUs are high end, they are still consumer CPUs mostly for home and office use, charging 1700 for 10 cores of Haswell-E copycat is ridiculous in every aspect. Seems the clouds are darkening over Intel again after 10 years or so.
By home and office I meant it literally being used at home or office, not using home or office typical applications. High end i7s at home are favored by some gamers and in work by software developers, video/audio/photo producers/editors all of which work in office.You don't like the 6950X prices? Get the Xeon version instead. I'm sure the price of those will be more to your liking.
As for 2011 being for home/office use, no one in their right mind would use these things for such purposes. Where I work, most of our computers are still Core 2. I'm one of the "lucky" ones with a Sandy Bridge, which replaced a Pentium 4 machine. At my other job, that place recently replaced a slew of Pentium 4 machines with Haswell i5 machines.
1723 USD for a chip that probably costs them 20 USD to poop out.
All about that monopoly position.
Then keep ALL of the "financial crap" out of CPUs & Overclocking. Stock prices are utterly irrelevant to how a CPU operates or how well it overclocks.
It was actually the derogatory, inflammatory political comments that were inappropriate and offensive. Maybe you should re-read the post.
Obviously no one including me is happy with these prices. The price is logical though. There is no competition. Why would intel drop prices? Even zen won't be able to dent intel's hedt market. Intel chips have higher IPC and clocks better. 8 core zen should be competitive to 6 core intel chips in throughput but 6 core chips are already priced properly. Intel wouldn't see profit in dropping the prices of 8 core products, forget the 10 cores.
Yea that's what I was thinking too, why they don't include ANY iGP in those CPUs when they are so expensive.And still no iGPU graphics? And let me guess, no X99 GPU enabled chipset as well?
:|
I hate to have dGPUs eating power, just because I need some basic display output.
As regards the 10 core price, I think intel believes that sales of this chip are pretty much inflexible to price. That is, those who have the money for a thousand or 1200 dollar chip (where I thought it would be priced) will just go ahead and pay 1700.00. However, I think they are mistaken here, not because the buyers dont have the money, but simply as a matter of principle, I think they are going to face huge resistance to this price.
It also devalues the 8 core, since the price did not come down, but it is no longer the top of the line chip. The only chip in the HEDT line-up that even remotely makes sense is the cheapest 6 core, and of course, for anything priced reasonably, intel could not resist gimping it with fewer PCI-E lanes. The whole pricing of this lineup is basically an upraised middle finger from Intel to anyone who wants more than a somewhat gimped six core. And I wont get started on the fact that despite the astronomical prices, the entire line is not on the latest architecture.
You pretty much nailed it right here. The pricing strategy actually makes me just want to go back to the mainstream line, as at least then I'll be on the latest platform and have the highest available per thread performance. As they increase core count each additional core becomes a smaller jump percentage-wise. I'm ok with that, but don't charge me disproportionately for them. I expected the 10 core to either come in at the traditional "EE" pricing or worst to be adjusted to about $1375 and the eight core to fall ever so slightly because it lost the allure of being the top chip. In the end all of this may end up just saving me money. I'm really like mini-ITX builds but have always wanted setups that don't allow for that. With Intel going nuts on HEDT pricing and nVidia basically throwing the finger to more than two way SLI seems like I'd be better served moving back to the mainstream and a single GPU.