You should see the price drop on retail stores later this month or on Feb...definitely Q1.
This is Intel's response to Phenom II's launch. HINT - You know they were a bit threatened with Phenom II especially on the lower/mid end DDR2 consumers. Intel still has the high end part of DDR2 consumers.
That's because a lot of consumer's are reluctant to do a full upgrade on DDR3 and they would rather stay with DDR2 until DDR2 prices skyrocket.
Let the price cut battles begin!
* AMD still has the upper hand on 4CPU setups since Intel can only do 2CPU setups. It's a very small market but heck one of those setup brings in big bucks for AMD.
* I doubt DDR3 can save Phenom II especially for daily computing, there'd probably be some gain, but still not enough.
You know honestly they should remove the Black Edition hype over their BE's. Since we all know that BE is supposed to be a high-end CPU or something that delivers just like its competition. They should just bring back the BE labeling/hype when they can come close to Intel's Extreme Edition. I'm not saying they should stop producing BE's..they should just stop hyping them, you know same box, blah blah.
There's no need to surrender, lol because things like this = WIN WIN situation.