I’ve looked at a lot of the benchmarks and the difference was in the ballpark of 1-5%, which isn’t dominating from my perspective... did I miss a few?

DigitalFoundry had an interesting take on frame rate/frame time performance on Intel/AMD. If you look at the graph you can see Ryzen dip down more for a few times when there's more computation or memory throughput needed.

That's not true, with more core Ryzen can run game with other apps without any problems it's not the same with Intel though.

unless you are compiling chrome in the background or streaming, you're not going to saturate even eight cores while gaming. in most benchmarks I've seen, the 9900k still performs better while streaming.

Now you are talking about Intel's best desktop CPU. of course it performs better while streaming otherwise it would be ..

okay, what parts are we talking about then? aside from the 3900x, the Intel parts all have the same core count as their amd counterpart at similar price points.

Yes if you don't count SMT.

similar mindset: Who needs more than 32-bit for internet address.

Part of it is intel k parts have quite a bit of overclocking headroom while zen 2 has none.

Intel has almost no overclocking headroom. It's only about 5% or so. Both AMD and Intel have squeezed everything they can out at this point, there's not really anything left.

The main difference is on Intel you get that magical sounding 5ghz number by overclocking, but it's not actually much higher than stock (4.7ghz on the 9900k is the "all-core turbo")

Right. I guess the Ryzen boost clock debacle is also part of it...