Rising price of quad cores

[technossomy]

Have been observing the prices of Intel quad cores go up since about july/aug 2008. Hardware normally sees a downward price pressure of about 10% per month on average. Since the global economy will be distinctly deflationary in the coming year, I am wondering whether anyone has an idea of why we are seeing 10% / 15% monthly price hikes in these generation of chips? Also with the advent of the i7 generation, shouldn't inventories be rationalised?

[questio verum]

Have been observing the prices of Intel quad cores go up since about july/aug 2008. Hardware normally sees a downward price pressure of about 10% per month on average. Since the global economy will be distinctly deflationary in the coming year, I am wondering whether anyone has an idea of why we are seeing 10% / 15% monthly price hikes in these generation of chips? Also with the advent of the i7 generation, shouldn't inventories be rationalised?

Where are you seeing the increases? Are you talking about the unit price per lots of 1,000? Or the single-unit retail price? I'm not really seeing this at all. The normal downward pricing trend that follows older technologies is a little tardy, but I haven't seen any increases significant enough to beg notice.
As for the role of the i7... the i7 won't realize any noticeable performance advantage over the Core2 until the upcoming die-shrink to 32 nm, so until then there's no real pressure to dump inventories. As a reflection of this, the debut price of the 45nm i7 is about 35% lower than that of it's Core2 predecessor.

Another factor that no one in the established media seems to linger on for long is the advanced state of the microprocessor today. The CPU has evolved to the point where it does its job quite well. As long as you avoid Vista (which apparently a large contingent of pc users has) the modern day Core2 or Phenom will perform most tasks quite snappily. Having a killer videocard setup, or state-of-the-art sound, or high-speed internet is much more important to the average home pc user than adding .2 or .4 Ghz to their CPU clock speed. Couple this with a treacherous global economy and a record number of business failures on the corporate user side of the equation, and it doesn't make a lot of sense to start increasing prices on last-generation technology.

Or am I missing something?

[oz]

This one looks good:

Intel® Core?2 Extreme Processor QX9775 - SLANY

It's currently only $1,549.99 at NewEgg, but does come with free shipping.

Would be fun to run it, though.

It's doubtful that I'd ever spend that kind of money for any CPU.

[technossomy]

One of our main suppliers tells us that the large distributors are based out of the US and the unit prices are dollar denominated, so it is the dollar-euro exchange rate where the price rises originate from.