4 ms·
"artificially increasing prices" - if the market, which has heavy competition, will bear the price increase, then there is nothing artificial about it - prices
by dedward 16y ago
"artificially increasing prices" - if the market, which has heavy competition, will bear the price increase, then there is nothing artificial about it - prices are not a fixed amount - intel is free to sell every single chip at a different price if the market will bear it.
Think of the logic. You want to produce a low end and a high end chip - because that's what the market is eating up. It's cheaper to have one fabrication process rather than two.... and suddenly, instead of busted, inferior chips being sold as lower end chips, we have the same chips in the same market niche, with the possibility of a simple software update to enable the high end features. It might smell funny at first, but as long as they are up-front about it, it's just business.
- wtallis 16y agoDo you honestly think that Intel is subject to "heavy competition" in the desktop CPU market? They have exactly one competitor (AMD), and because Intel is so much bigger and has so much more money, they always have newer and better fabs. The only ways AMD can be competitive with Intel are to be really daringly clever with their chip design (Athlon 64, and hopefully the upcoming Bobcat and Bulldozer cores), sell their chips at lower profit margins, take advantage of Intel's mistakes (Itanic vs Athlon 64), and to pick their battles wisely (AMD has never been able to field a whole product lineup that is competitive across the board). The barriers of entry to that market are so high that even AMD can't fully surmount them, and AMD definitely can't gain ground or even maintain solvency by doing what Intel does but slightly better.