You're guilty of thinking from the perspective of a market leader.
No. Those prices are already far cheaper than Intel's.
Both are happening in this thread...
For the high end sure AMD might not have as much incentive to lower prices, but I and a lot of others think that isn't true for the low end.
We can argue all day about what the exact prices will be but in the end I'm betting they'll be lower than current ones.
As I said before, AMD already dominates the ~$200 and under market.
AMD doesn't need to drop prices to compete with itself.
Intel dominates the $300+ market with processors such as the Core i7-8700K, Core i7-9700K and Core i9-9900K.
The $300+ market is where AMD can make inroads and gain marketshare.
That's where the processors such as the $329.99 8C/16T Ryzen 7 3700X (comparable to Core i9-9900K in performance) and the $499 12C/16T Ryzen 9 2800 come in.
What's missing in this debate is that even if AMD were competing against its own gen 1+2 sales with gen3, that isn't actually a bad thing; their deal with GF is a bad one, so better to use their wafer allocation on a smaller IO die that yields much more than the larger year old gen, since they'll get the cost spread over at least 2 units compared to 1 for the last gen. Once the WSA expires, you bet your home on AMD cutting all ties with GF.
Cannibalising your own sales isn't a bad thing if you're selling the replacement product at a higher margin despite a lower price for the consumer.
How do you know that the replacement product are going to have higher margin despite selling at half the price? (supposedly, the MSRP for 6C/12T went from $199 this generation to $99 the next generation, according to the so called "leak")
Well, the DEMAND side of the market expresses what consumers want. And also, there are two prominent business strategies which impact pricing: profit maximisation and market share maximisation. And in both of these strategies the opinions (or preferences) of consumers are crucial.
AMD can't take market share from itself (obviously), but AMD can take market share from Intel.
That means swaying consumers who intended to buy products such as the Core i7-8700K, Core i7-9700K, and Core i9-9900K.
Products such as the Ryzen 7 3700X and Ryzen 9 3800 provide compelling alternatives to those consumers.
$329 8C/16T Ryzen 7 3700X with similar performance to Core i9-9900K
$499 12C/24T Ryzen 9 3800 with 50% more cores/threads than Core i9-9900K
But AMD isn't just competing with Intel's performance they are competing with the ghost of Intel the superior. Their goal is to incentivise people away from buying a 9900k, they have to be prepared for Comet Lake. That doesn't mean going soft and throwing margin away. But if they are pricing their consumer chips out of thousands of purchases just because Intel doesn't have a great competitor for them they are doing themselves a disservice in their attempt to get market share. This can go back in forth for days. So let me ask you a question. Knowing what you know of AMD. Lets say you were offering these 12c and 16c AM4 chips, lets call them the 3800, 3800x (12c 65w and 110w CPU's) and a 3900 and 3900x (same) what would you price them at?
As I said before, that's exactly why AMD don't name and price its products until close to release: there's no knowing what the competition is going to be like until close to launch day.
The pricing above assumes Comet Lake's pricing is similar to Coffee Lake's pricing, which is, of cause, not a sure thing.