Let's quietly approach the elephant in the room: Intel's pricing structure will hardly stand the onslaught of AMD's Ryzen, which, if early benchmarks are to be believed, has apparently caught Intel with its pants down. Even purely from the leaks that have been following us non-stop in the last several months, it's obvious that AMD managed to outdo itself in the best way possible, managing to develop an architecture which offers up to 52% more performance than their previous one. Intel, which was enjoying the sun-shaded comfort of carrying a virtual, high-performance x86 monopoly, grew stagnant in innovation, ensuring it would stretch its bottom-line by way of minimal R&D investment - just enough to be able to name their improvements as a "new generation" of processors each year.

This in turn has led to an interesting outlook in the high-performance x86 market: customers aren't blind, and they see when a company is stretching its fingers in their pockets. A stagnant performance increase on Intel's customer processors with almost a decade of single-digit increments and paralyzed core-counts to an (admittedly strong) architecture have taken away a lot of customers' goodwill towards Intel. That Intel still has strong brand cognition is a no-brainer, but it doesn't have as much brand credit these days, on account of the low performance gains, and tick-tock falter, than it did in the days of Athlon 64. AMD has the benefit of being the underdog, of coming up with something new, fresh and performant (with headlines claiming it is the latest revival of a sleeping giant)... and those are all points that put pressure on Intel to reignite interest on its products.

Now, the tides are indeed catching up to Intel, with AMD, this metaphor's proverbial David, striking back at a slumbering Goliath. The promise of a powerful multi-core approach and strong IPC performance (which all leaks point towards), paired with insane, non-consumer-gouging pricing means that AMD has built-up a powerful momentum both in sales and goodwill, with Ryzen pre-orders basically flying off the shelves of several retailers.

All of these serve to point out a simple statement: Intel's product-line and pricing scheme as they are weren't designed to compete. They were designed to usher in an era of lacking competition, to extend Intel's bottom-line to its fullest, with little consideration for consumers' interests and innovation (whether or not we think that that's how businesses should operate is a discussion best left for another day). Make no mistake: Intel Will bring some price-cuts to its product line if Ryzen does live up to expectations (and there is no reason to think it won't). Their product stack just falls flat in the face of Ryzen's pricing scheme, and if Intel wants to keep its current product lines relevant, pricing is the easiest, fastest tool to do so, barring some knee-jerk introduction of new CPUs, though you will, apparently, also have to get a new motherboard to run them.

If you're looking for a good deal on a new processor, but want nothing to do with AMD's upcoming prodigy child of a CPU, the post-Ryzen time-frame will possibly be the best time in years to make such a jump. Intel will be hard-pressed to work the only angle it can - pricing - so as to get some leeway until it can make an extensive revision to its desktop CPU product lines come 8th generation Core "Coffee Lake". This is the best time in years - period - to buy a new processor for all your computational needs. And Intel will probably try and hold you from jumping on the Ryzen bandwagon by throwing some unassuming (yet unavoidable) price-cuts your way.

Oh, and by the way. Here are some discounted Intel CPUs. Let's see if such sales catch up on Newegg and Amazon.