chrismv48 said:
lol at the turkish website. I see your point about speculation, but I would think there would at least be some precedents we can use to make reasonable predictions as to how markets will react when a new CPU is introduced. But maybe there are just too many variables at play here, and as the COLGeek pointed out, the drops in price might be negligible in any case due to tight profit margins in this industry.
No one knew that Sandy Bridge was going to be as good as it was; there was no way to know. Lynnfield -- the predacessor to SB -- was extremely powerful and overkill for most applications that a user would toss at it -- games, video editing, DVD rips, whatever -- but Intel managed to knock one out of the park with SB.
AMD has some pretty sharp people -- they have been around the block a few times and surprised a lot of people back in 2003 with the Athlon 64 while Intel was struggling with the Pentium 4. So there's one precedent.
Another precedent is AMD's struggle to match the performance of Intel's i3/i5/i7 core series and before that with the core duo series all the way back to 2005.
There has been so much back-and-forth between Intel and AMD over the last 15 years that anyone can find competing examples of why AMD will or will not knock Intel back on its heels that past history cannot be used. One man's opinion.
I do have to thank you for putting this thread up; I have been on the fence about making this upgrade. I've been watching the price of Sandy Bridge processors and motherboards every day since February and the prices haven't budged and a lot of people point out examples of Intel processor prices all the way back to the core 2 duo era that never changed. I think I might just pull the trigger on Sandy Bridge today, actually.
My wife will be thrilled...