Yes the good old days. They are long dead and buried and they are never coming back.
You say that like it's a good thing - it's not by a long shot. Trust me, the only major difference between now and "the good old days" is lack of competition from AMD. When competition is strong and products are of comparable quality / performance, the war move to pricing,
and the winners are us - the consumers. This is why I hope AMD makes a comeback (that and I'm a bit of an AMD fan tough I like intel stuff too - just check out my collection in the signature
)
Low end parts will initally be Bristol Ridge, as Zen will not make it's way to the APUs (and a 4C/4T part) until later. 4C/8T for anything under $300 - assuming performance is about the same as Skylake, which it won't be - would be plain silly and they probably would not keep up with demand in any case. If the performance is at about Haswell levels, they have to be cheaper, that is true. But I can't imagine them being that much cheaper. And 8C/16T I fully expect to be as close to $1000 as they dare, probably $800 if at Haswell IPC. They don't do goodwill, and undercutting the competition by too much and they will have part shortages, which would suck for them. And I cannot see the shareholders/investors liking them selling parts too cheap.
I base this on AMD of the past ten years, as opposed to AMD from twenty to fifteen years ago, which - technologically and economically - is so long ago it's almost fiction.
I completely agree, but like I said above, a couple of years from now, if AMD is competitive, we'll be seeing things change.
To prove your point about AMD, back in the GTX 4xx / radeon HD 5xxx days, the Radeon 5850 was up to 20% more expensive then the GTX 460 1GB, even tough the latter wasn't that much slower. I bought nvidia of course.
On the GPU front, AMD was very competitive during the GTX 6xx/7xx vs HD 7xxxx era (5-6 years ago?). I fondly remember my HD 7950's - especially that they were slightly cheaper then the GTX 760 and a bit faster in a few games, but the 760's lead kept decreasing as AMD drivers matured, as opposed to nvidia cards witch plateaued in performance, then started to drop as nvidia released that gameworks crap, crippling the 6xx series and later the 7xx series shortly after the maxwell launch. I'm mentioning this because just today I re-tested my old Sapphire HD 7950 Dual-X Flex OC against a EVGA GTX 770 I got really cheap for my collection - and they are pretty much on par, with the 7950 leading in modern games, and the 770 leading in 2011-2012 games. I trew in a Gigabyte GTX 760 windforce just for kicks, and unlike the 7950 witch can handle all of today's games at 1080p / high (high-ultra in some cases with a bit of AA) the 760 struggles to match it in all but a few games... reverting both setups to 2012 drivers the 760 gets a 5-10% advantage in most games, but most modern games won't run well (or at all - ex Fallout 4, Doom) with the old drivers on either card.
