I have, perhaps, a different perspective. I have been spending a lot of my income on computer hardware and power for the last decade or so; and being involved in spending other people's money on same for another half-decade back.<p>My take? When Intel thinks they are ahead, compute doesn't get cheaper.<p>In the DDR2 days, If you were on Intel, you had the choice between the stunningly inefficient and expensive rambus ram, or a stunningly shitty memory buss with (not very many) low-power ddr2 modules.<p>At the time, the AMD HyperTransport system was absolutely beautiful. Even on cheap boards, you could get more than 2x the low-power ddr2 ram modules per CPU that intel could. (at the time, lower-density modules were dramatically cheaper, per gigabyte, than higher-density modules) It worked way better when you had multiple CPUs, too.<p>Then ddr3 came, and Intel came up with their QPI systems, which were awesome. AMD came back with a competently built ddr3 platform, too; the G34 systems were a huge upgrade from the mcp55 chipset socket F platform.<p>But the benchmarks came out in Intel's favor, even when AMD had twice the cores. I mean, you could argue that the AMD systems had advantages in some limited situations, but they had lost the dramatic advantage.<p>As far as I can tell, intel has been largely resting on their laurels, price-wise. The E5-2620 is better than, but really not radically better than the E5520. Now, some of the higher-end E5s are pretty nice, but they are priced accordingly.<p>Until Intel gets some real competition again, we have to pay for our performance gains.<p>So yeah, really, until AMD gets their legs back under them, and I hope the A1100[1] will do it, I don't expect dramatic performance per dollar gains from Intel.<p>[1]<a href="http://www.amd.com/en-us/press-releases/Pages/amd-to-accelerate-2014jan28.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://www.amd.com/en-us/press-releases/Pages/amd-to-acceler...</a>