People need to buy their stuff for them to make money, in particularly the APU's etc. AMD can't improve the APU's etc beyond what they are currently because they need profit for R&D, so the circle of decline is self fulfilling. Also Intel have the brand name, which is probably the only reason why the Pentium 4 sold so well, particularly the socket 478's in comparison to the then AMD CPU's at the time. Intel's profits are so high because they can afford to saturate the market with dozens of similar CPU's with not much price difference, which is something you can really only achieve if you're already in a good position. If you aren't, market consolidation if the route to take. Also Intel do charge quite a bit, especially considering the price difference between the i5-4670K and the i7-4770K, realistically the i7-4770K is not worth anywhere near the difference reflected in the price. It would be interesting to know how much more expensive it is for Intel the make the i7-4770K than the i5-4670K in real terms. Also most people are buying something they don't use (the on-die GPU). This is different to the AMD's APU's simply because people buying them aren't typically going to put a GTX 780 Ti or a R9-290X on it, it's more for the benefit of a low end gaming rig, HTPC, basic Office computer, and that is where AMD are better. Intel really need a kick in the pants though in the mid end CPU market (i5-4670K etc), which in turn would also follow through to the higher end. AMD can still achieve this, but it would require a much more modern CPU, new motherboard and chipset, and an 8-core CPU option 🙂. Having it as an APU and able to crossfire with any then current AMD GPU's (and not just very specific GPU's) would go a long way also. The Crossfire doesn't have to be a 50/50 split, it could be even 30/70, or 15/35/35 if you have two discrete cards. This is unlikely to happen, but it would certainly give AMD a massive leg-up if they manage much better IPC performance with Excavator, utilise DDR4, PCI-E 4.0, SATA Express etc., and be on at least 20 nm tech (if not 16 nm).