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After refreshing Amazon's Ryzen page for a month to get a 5950x, I finally bit the bullet and paid 200$ extra to buy it from a scalper. Even though I paid more

After refreshing Amazon's Ryzen page for a month to get a 5950x, I finally bit the bullet and paid 200$ extra to buy it from a scalper. Even though I paid more than the list price I think the value of this CPU is insane compared to the competition. IMO AMD massively under-priced their product.

leadingthenet 5y ago
A clear sign of market failure. There’s a reason scalpers can charge the prices they do.
LeifCarrotson 5y ago
I agree the value is higher than expected, but I do think that AMD is doing a surprisingly good job of balancing current sales against past and future inertia. Obviously, per the article, they're doing great in terms of sales, but should they be doing better? The standard, for more than a decade, has been to buy Intel. If AMD is 2x the performance of Intel, and consumers were perfectly rational, they could list their products at 1.99x the price and everyone would buy only AMD. Consumers are not rational. If instead they list it at an insane value, like 1.5x the price with 2x the performance, people will change the default choice to AMD. Currently, recommending Intel means you're an out of touch dinosaur, using obsolete knowledge... Haven't you read the benchmarks? What will you recommend next, 15k RPM SAS spinning rust for storage and the icc compiler? (Or maybe you're making a pragmatic decision based on stock levels, but that's a bit nuanced). Cultural and emotional ideas like that are likely to last even after Intel catches up. It's honestly probably a good thing for AMD's cultural forecast that there's scarcity and scalping. That will have a more lasting memory; people wouldn't remember getting an AMD 2x processor in the 2020s at only 1.99x the price of Intel, but they'll remember buying processors from shady scalpers at $200 over list because it's just that good.

leadingthenet 5y ago

A clear sign of market failure. There’s a reason scalpers can charge the prices they do.

LeifCarrotson 5y ago

I agree the value is higher than expected, but I do think that AMD is doing a surprisingly good job of balancing current sales against past and future inertia. Obviously, per the article, they're doing great in terms of sales, but should they be doing better? The standard, for more than a decade, has been to buy Intel. If AMD is 2x the performance of Intel, and consumers were perfectly rational, they could list their products at 1.99x the price and everyone would buy only AMD. Consumers are not rational. If instead they list it at an insane value, like 1.5x the price with 2x the performance, people will change the default choice to AMD. Currently, recommending Intel means you're an out of touch dinosaur, using obsolete knowledge... Haven't you read the benchmarks? What will you recommend next, 15k RPM SAS spinning rust for storage and the icc compiler? (Or maybe you're making a pragmatic decision based on stock levels, but that's a bit nuanced). Cultural and emotional ideas like that are likely to last even after Intel catches up. It's honestly probably a good thing for AMD's cultural forecast that there's scarcity and scalping. That will have a more lasting memory; people wouldn't remember getting an AMD 2x processor in the 2020s at only 1.99x the price of Intel, but they'll remember buying processors from shady scalpers at $200 over list because it's just that good.