Intel lowered their prices with the release of the 18 core for 2000$. Before AMD became competitive again you had to pay 1700$ for only 10 cores or go for a 3000$ or 4000$ 18 core Xeon.

EDIT - of course there are also Xeons between 10 and 18 cores, but it should show that you had to pay much more to get 18 cores, or only slightly less for much less cores.

I think AMD have been really clever in how the have built the Zen system, unlike Intel these higher end CPUS are basically just multiple lower end ones put together. This means they don't need different fabrication (they just build ryzen7 CPUs) and given they have such good yields on those chips know they can bring the price down. I would expect this chip to be at most 2x a ryzen 1800.

However, it is not jus the chip cost for these systems its also the mainboard if AMD can get the motherboards to be cheaper then that will make a big difference in the overall price.

These aren't your average consumer/gamer/enthusiast CPUs though. For what it is, the price doesn't look insane at all. And I'm concerned that AMD is not going to be much of a winner here because most people looking at these top-of-the-line workhorse CPUs are probably going to pick the better performer over the cheaper part -- they aren't exactly doing budget shopping.

But it did. Intel reduced their 8 core processor prices from 1000$ to 600$. See their new lineup: http://imgur.com/a/LSpau

Basically Intel has been greedy / hasn't had the competition. The result of Moore's law is still quite possible it seems. Even with a slowdown in chip density; computing prices can fall on similar historical curves now that AMD is competing.