1, HEDT is only 1% or even lower
2, With KabyLake release in January nobody would go for X99
3, Everyone knew Ryzen was launching in Q1
4, Everyone knows SkyLake-X is coming in Q3
1+2+3+4 = Even without Ryzen, you would be stupid to even consider X99 today.
And Intel doesnt even have to sweat, they had Broadwell-E in the market for almost a year now, they made up more than what they spend for R&D. No need to lower prices now, they would sell less BD-E anyway, better sell less at those huge margins than cannibalize KabyLake sales with price cuts
What am i reading? Cant be serious here....
1. So just because its only 1% of their sales they wont care whether from this point onward they sell any HEDT CPU?
2. Yeah, except for all those people who want more cores than 4.
3. Ryzen´s price to performance ratio was not known up until maybe 2 weeks ago
4. Q3 or better said Skylake-X is potentially half year away. If someone is about to buy a new rig now, unreleased CPU/platform is not really gonna help him.
1 + 2 + 3 + 4 = if intel drops prices of the BW-E line-up to a level competitive with Ryzen, there would be absolutely no reason not to consider them. Unless you would refuse to buy from them on principle for their price-hiking before Ryzen, which i admit would be something they deserve.
EDIT: I cant quote for life! Not on Opera, not on Chrome, not on Firefox! It used to work, now it does not! Is it just me?