I'm a bit dubious. If they have such an amazing part why is it being sold for so cheap? Why not 80% of the price of the comparable Intel part? Selling it at 50% or even less raises some heavy alarm bells for me.
1. Because Intel is about to significantly drop their prices in response to Ryzen.
2. Because AMD really wants to immediately hurt Intel's revenues as badly as possible.
3. Because AMD has such an uphill battle to regain mind share that it really needs to release a product that makes people realize that AMD now has the superior perf/$ product, beyond any doubt. If Ryzen was only priced 20% lower than Intel, many people/OEMs/etc would not be motivated enough to go AMD.
If they price their CPUs anywhere near Intel, even if they are marginally better, OEM and partners will be shy and slow in creating new lines of products. They will only modestly deep their toes on AMD waters.
Intel can hold the line for a couple of years by offering OEMs large rebates/discounts for keeping volumes of sales in line with what they bought pre-Zen.
AMD has no choice but build market share and ecosystem by pricing way below Intel. Otherwise, history will repeat itself and they won't be able to capitalize long term on the Zen architecture as happened with the Hammer architecture.
In case you were also wondering why Intel's pricing has been so obscene, it's to do with AMD's underwhelming pre-Zen microarchitectures and having had no serious competition in the past decade until now.
I'd expect them to make token gestures in MSRP and quietly make larger drops in practice; and to accelerate new models so it appears as if those new models are better price/perf wise due to their great new design.
Oh and of course, intel's 7700k is still quite a bit faster per-core, and there's AVX, so intel can play those cards loudly. I'd argue that even today almost all people are best served by a few fast cores than many slightly slower ones; there;s just so much poorly scaling software around. And where multicore works really well trivial the GPU is often just around the corner...
For servers the story may be different.
That way, Intel sells to those OEMs not only the hardware but also the promise that end customers will think that the parts were more expensive.
- AMD have optimized for die size, at 44mm^2 vs Broadwell-E at 246mm^2. This will result in an order of magnitude better yields and margin improvements.
- Intel prices high in the >= 8-core space because: they can; there is no current competition; and the aforementioned yield/margin issue.
- The Intel parts have more advanced and expensive features aimed at professional markets; i.e. quad-channel memory controller, more PCIe lanes, and in newer architectures, integrated Thunderbolt controllers, to name a few.
So Intel's "-E" enthusiast line isn't really the optimal price point in terms of generating revenue via volume, it's just the high end of a sliding scale.
Because they get exploded in single-threaded performances, so they have to pit their 8-core parts against Intel's 4 cores.
The 1700X will be competing against the $350 7700K more than the $1100 6900K (which incidentally is a Broadwell-E part not a Skylake part despite de 6 prefix)
The only redeeming quality of the 7700K is that Intel was able to raise the turbo freq to 4.5 GHz, while the 1700X only boosts to 3.8 GHz. So yeah single-threaded perf will be higher with Intel.
I should add that the above is the main reason the kaby lake release is so lackluster. There is very little reason to upgrade your desktop to a 7 series (laptops get power optimization and 4k playback support).
It's also the main reason why AMD might look appealing, lack of worthwile upgrade from Intel while AMD delivers twice the cores/threads for not a gread deal more then a 7600K.
You're talking about Skylake 6-series, the 6900K is Broadwell-E not Skylake despite being 6-branded.
Kaby Lake only brought GPU & video decoding improvements to the table, that's it. CPU performance is otherwise identical to Skylake.
[0] http://ark.intel.com/products/94196/Intel-Core-i7-6900K-Proc...
I assume that they are getting blown out of the water on single core performance and hence picked up an i7-7700k. We'll see if I made the right choice on March 2nd when real benchmarks surface.