And if you want to go up $100-200 more buys you a threadripper 1950, which is 16 core 32 thread, has twice the memory channels and more than twice the pcie lanes...

Edit for clarification: 100-200 over 9900k price

You lose a lot of single core performance, and TR4 motherboards are also a bit pricier than their AM4 counterparts.

Well, higher end z370 board are not much cheaper and I expect the new z390 close the gap even more

ThreadRipper is great if your tasks are always multi-threaded, but if you're doing anything that sees more benefit from single-core performance (like a lot of games, though this is changing), you're better off with something else.

Don't forget just how many simultaneous processes run on a stock OS install anymore.

More cores/threads are good at least to the point where you have as many hardware threads as software threads.

Even a pile of single-threaded apps running simultaneously benefits from multiple hardware threads.

Please note that hyperthreading may not have the same benefits in AMD and Intel.

From https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pavlo/papers/p2209-kersten.pdf

"The only significant difference between the two platforms is that, although both platforms offer 2-way Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT), Intel’s hyper-threading implementation seems to be much better. On the Skylake, we see a performance boost from hyper- threading for all queries. On the AMD system, the benefit of SMT is either very small, and for some queries the use of hyper-threads results in a performance degradation."

Most synthetic benchmarks have proven amd's SMT scales far better than hyperthreading. It might be the paper's domain that's more suited for HT. Moreover, they appear to be using AVX instructions, which are arguably faster, but don't provide an accurate picture on hyperthreading performance

Yeah, take a look at this: https://www.anandtech.com/show/11544/intel-skylake-ep-vs-amd...

> On average, both Xeons pick up about 20% due to SMT (Hyperthreading). The EPYC 7601 improved by even more: it gets a 28% boost on average.

These results are the same as I've seen everywhere except the quote you pulled out. Zen's SMT is more effective than Intel's HT.

As we now know, this is because Intel cheats. That's why Intel's smt is vulnerable to whatever that recent spectre/meltdown variant was called and AMDs is not.

Oh wow, Intel you have the fastest gaming CPU ever for 488$, up to 50% more performance over your last generation CPU

Or I can get a CPU that traded blows with your last generation CPU for 320$.

I'll take my 500$ CPU please and thank you.

If you're stretching out of your comfort zone to afford a 2700X it's one thing, but the moment you're the type of consumer comparing the 9900k to a 2700X, it's not even a contest. Everyone accepts PC parts are a case of diminishing returns, the 9900k is delivering beastly, even if diminishing, returns for what it costs.