| price-to-performance is the last resort of a company that has failed at taking the performance crown. Nobody cuts prices more than they have to, but everyone adjusts prices to where they need to go to sell the product. Bulldozer was priced low because it was genuine garbage, it was actually slower than Phenom in a lot of cases (which blows the "it was about price to peformance!" thing out of the water - nobody regresses performance on purpose). (and before people wind up about the obvious counterexample: Ryzen was priced low because a 1800X was genuinely a lot slower than a 5960X in productivity tasks due to latency and poor AVX performance, and got completely smoked in gaming. If they had tried to go head-to-head with Intel at $1000 pricing they wouldn't have sold anything because it would have been a far inferior package to what Intel offered, they had to cut prices by around half to make it a compelling offering. And even then it was not that appealing compared to, say, a 5820K.) Companies need to make enough of a showing to attract consumers but if a company prices something super aggressively, there's often a catch. And that's bulldozer in a nutshell. Oh shit the product sucks. What can we charge for a mediocre "8-core" (sorta) that underperforms the 4-core i7? Offer it at i5 pricing and see if anyone bites. If they had managed to achieve good performance, they would have priced it appropriately. (the other thing is - people prefer to make the comparison about the FX-8350, but that's not Bulldozer, that's Steamroller. Bulldozer was the FX-8150/FX-6350, which actually did outright regress performance vs a Phenom X6, and was priced relatively steeply due to "8 real cores". Bulldozer went up against Sandy Bridge, Steamroller was more of an Ivy Bridge/Haswell competitor, and that's where prices really started to drop. It isn't a huge difference but Intel was making some progress too in those days.) Price chart: https://www.anandtech.com/show/4955/the-bulldozer-review-amd... |
During the early part of the bulldozer timeframe AMD could provide a competitive part of much of intel's lineup at a lesser cost. It was only at the end were they kept falling farther and farther behind that it was a problem. For a few years there, you could actually _SEE_ in intels pricing where AMD's top part was because there would be a bunch of parts all clustered below some number (say $200) and then there would be a big price jump between every part above that line.
And so AMD had a real problem when you went into the $RETAILER looking at a $600 laptop because while their laptop might have been better than the similarly priced intel, what you would hear is "amd sucks" and so people would actually pick the inferior product.