Intel To Launch Lower Price Quad-core CPU

'Then suddenly we will have $1500 Core 2 Duo's from Intel with 5 year cycles between generations.'

Ahhh great - another the world will end without AMD keeping up the good fight "economist".

Clearly this is an accurate statement, because Intel will likely want to completely eliminate CPU growth by quadrupling the price and slowing down the technology cycles.... yeah that will be the best way to convince folks to upgrade computers (which is what drives a lot of the growth in the CPU industry).

Once you have 100% of the market, you need to grow the market to grow your company... quadrupling prices and slowing down product innovation will not enable this.

I agree with no-velocity.

I think a company such as IBM or Samsung would buy AMD before they went out of business. And even if they did go under, if Intel chip prices skyrocketed and cycles slowed to a halt, a competitor would emerge to take advantage. Intel won't have that. They might slow down release times a bit (3 year, 1 1/2 yr tick, 1 1/2 yr tock cycle) from their ridiculous pace, but the actual tech development would still be chugging away just in case competition arose.

Release times will slow down because Moore's law can't hold true indefinitely. Processes can't shrink much more and besides their new transistors they were already strugging to do anything innovative beyond their already great Core2 architecture, to just keep refining that as much as they could.

Without this innovation, price ceilings will drop as there isn't any longer as significant a performance gain. Today we even see people rejecting performance gains, deciding they want yesterday's performance and Windows XP instead of Vista to save some money. Fuel prices certainly aren't helping the situation either, people are re-evaluating what their true needs are, it's not as geeky trendy anymore to declare you have the fastest PC on the block because any Tom, Dick or Harry can get close enough if they want to throw a few hundred dollars Dell's direction.

AMD does not have to match this price. All AMD has to do is offer something fast enough for most common uses (email, surfing, office, etc) which they already had, at an attractive price point. Every year the need to keep improving performance goes down, most people with a mere 2 cored CPU aren't using 10% of their processing capability on average, might not ever peg a dual core at 100% usage per core.

Intel is planning to launch a Core 2 Quad Q8000 CPU series, offering entry-level prices to counter AMD’s triple-core CPUs in the mainstream market

So why the hell is the processor considerably more expensive than Q6600?! (at least where I live)