A lead is worthless if you charge more.. Which is why Intel will be FORCED to price adjust..
Intel has only rarely responded to competition by reducing prices on existing products. They will release a new product with a more agreeable price, but they will continue to charge a premium.
Large companies are judged based on a few metrics. Market competitiveness isn't one of them. Product margin, revenue, and profit are.
If Intel can still sell its overpriced CPUs, which they can, they will keep the prices high because that doesn't hurt product margin or profit, though it may reduce revenue in that segment... but they can make up for that with lower-tier products, to hide the damage.
That is what Intel has always done, I don't expect them to change. If the price drops on the 6900k, it will only be by $200 or so. Intel will not acknowledge a competitor's claim to superiority.
But, AFTER the price adjust, what will AMD do..
They're still playing second fiddle..
Not second fiddle, the reactionary party. Right now, Intel is the reactionary party - because AMD has challenged their product marketability. We are all waiting for Intel to react. So many seem to think they will drop prices to match AMD... but they've never done that. Pentium 4 carried a premium over the faster-tiered Athlons.
Athlon 64 3200+ was ~$200... as was the Pentium 4 530 (3Ghz). The Athlon would win in 2/3rds of the benchmarks by 15% or more, but Intel still charged the same for less performance. They did this because they knew they could sell more just fine = based purely on their name. That hasn't changed, except this time Intel HEDT platform has more to offer. Much more connectivity, many more PCI-e lanes, and so on that attracts a certain crowd that wouldn't buy AMD if it were twice as fast at half the cost.
Now, what's AMD to do.. they go down another price tier ? What is so compelling about AMD exactly..
AMD has more products coming out - FOUR Zen versions are planned, with one already only a year away.
Intel has more, of course, but they didn't expect AMD to catch up as much as they have (seriously, who did? I knew the architecture quite well and my highest-end estimate last year was 49%
total performance uplift over Excavator... my lowest was an even 40%). It takes years to make changes to architectures, We've been hearing about Coffee Lake for years now, and Intel has already disclosed that it is just another bump like Kaby Lake.
Sure, that's enough to keep current Ryzen at bay, but AMD will be hot on its trail with Zen version 2. Intel will release more affordable Coffee Lake SKUs, most likely, in order to counter the looming AMD threat, but they will maintain the bulk of their high pricing structure.
After that, Intel has 10nm Cannon Lake. This will be a data-center first product in 2018. Zen version 3 should arrive fairly close to Cannon Lake's desktop appearance. There's no telling how that match-up will fair out, but Coffee and Cannon Lake designs have been finalized for some time - Intel can't do much extra to them at this point... they have to let the chips fall where they may. Intel has yet to break ground on 7nm... AMD is already working on 7nm products with Global Foundries using IBM's 7nm tech... which is derived from an earlier partnership before Global Foundries was separated from AMD.
AMD is in the superior position here, which is unexpected, they have three moves planned and ready, Intel has two and has been forced to re-envision the future after that.
It will be very interesting to see how this all works out in the end. I don't expect AMD to be willing to play the bargain card if they hold the upper hand. They didn't last time this happened.