I am already salivating over a 7950X. I finally broke down and upgraded my development machine to a 5950X about a year ago. Of course, I knew that no matter when you get the 'latest and greatest' it will soon be eclipsed by the next generation of hardware; but I am having a bit of buyer's remorse anyway.

I am building a multi-threaded platform that will do a bunch of data management functions in parallel. Things like queries against relational tables can be broken down into smaller pieces and executed simultaneously on multi-core CPUs.

Here is a video that shows how it can run queries in parallel better than Postgres: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVICKCkWMZE

I am just glad AMD didn't bump up the core count in the 7950X or I would really have buyer's remorse.

If it makes you feel any better. It's not just a CPU this time. You need a newer mobo (expensive than AM4 boards), a DDR5 ram (also expensive) which will probably go down in price a bit by next year. So overall if it satisfies your needs 5950x is a great pick.

I wasn't suggesting that it would be cheap to move to the 7950X. I got a new motherboard, RAM, and SSD when I upgraded to the 5950X. If I had waited, it would have probably cost me an additional $300-$400 more to move to the AM5 and DDR5 components now.

The 5950X certainly will meet my 'needs' for several years. It is my 'wants' that is making me wish I had waited.

"We are looking at some impressive gains gen-to-gen, especially when single-threaded performance is considered. This will be especially important for workloads such as gaming."