The Tech Report crunched three years of historical pricing data and made some interesting discoveries about the current state of the x86 processor market

Competition is the cornerstone of a free market. Without healthy competition, unchallenged incumbents grow complacent, the pace of innovation slows, and prices either stagnate or rise. Those ill effects can be witnessed across a number of industries, but over the past few years, they've become increasingly apparent in the x86 processor market.

To be fair, Intel can hardly be faulted for not innovating. Year after year, the behemoth from Santa Clara manages to churn out new generations of chips with better performance and power efficiency than their predecessors. But Intel has been spoiled this past little while by a relatively placid competitive landscape. AMD, for all of its hard work, has largely failed to outdo its chief rival. Lately, it's had a hard time just keeping up.

You might have already noticed the resulting price stagnation. We've seen it first-hand when putting together our system guides. No matter how many chips AMD throws into the ring or how often it slashes prices, Intel CPUs always seem to stay put at roughly the same price points until the next generation comes along. There are exceptions in the bargain-basement realm of sub-$100 processors, but they're few and far between.

  As AMD struggles, Intel chip prices stagnate