AMD did a great job with Threadripper, making high end CPUs much more affordable. It's interesting that Intel doesn't lower their prices. What's the logic behind it?
They spent such a long time making the "best" that now they get to ride that goodwill for a while with consumers, regardless of where they are presently with respect to competition. Toyota and Honda enjoy the same luxury, they outsell the competition today more because of what they did in 90s than what they did in 2016-17.
Unsurprisingly, older generation models tend to dominate that list. Keep in mind that the thermal efficiency for Xeon v2 and v3 models is lower than v4; Passmark does not include power draw in this ranking. If you can afford the extra power usage and don't mind DDR3 RAM, high clockspeed + high core CPUs can be had relatively cheaply by going with V2.
I'm of the mind that AMD's smaller cores working together is the secret sauce to their price advantage.
Intel has done an amazing done stuffing 28 cores into one piece of silicon and extracting as much performance as possible all for the low price of $10k.
AMD took their 8 core part that they are selling essentially up and down their product line... and slapped 4 of them together.
Intel was selling 18-core chips for >$2,400 then when Threadripper came out Intel released the 18-core i9 for "only" $2,000, so that is something of a price drop.
Also, Intel's $350 8700K was cheaper at launch than AMD's $450 1800X even though the 8700K is faster in gaming.
Keep in mind that AMD has an inherent advantage: the Zen architecture and Glue.
When AMD fabs a TR2 they have to find 4 good Ryzen dies which are fairly small and they make a lot of them since they are part of the entire lineup. Once they have 4 good dies, they get glued together.
If they wanted 64 cores they'd just have to look for 8 good Ryzen dies, halving their yield compared to 32.
On the Intel side they have to increase the silicon area and then hope that all 64 cores are capable of full core speed in the current setup.
Glueing CPUs together makes it cheap to scale at little cost.
Err, that's only partially true at best. If you have many dies, the cost (in money, in chip real estate and in performance drop) of the interconnect skyrockets.
AMD's advantage of picking and choosing smaller parts still reigns supreme. If a Infinity Fabric component on the AMD die is defective enough to necessitate it is turned off the die is no longer able to participate in some of the more complex multi-die couplings. If the mesh component on an Intel die is defective the core(two actually because SKUs) has to be fused off and the part automatically bins as a lower SKU. As the mesh increases in complexity more and more of the design can be compromised.
The grandparent comment is not claiming that $2k is under $800, but instead that Intel would be able to charge a higher price for the i9 if the TR was not on the market.
I got my 1950x for $699 a few months ago. Its been $699 for a while at Microcenter.
The "price-competitive" i9-7900x is 10-cores for $799, and seems to be the best price-competitive comparison. Better single-thread, better at AVX512 tasks, but weaker in general purpose multithreading due to having fewer cores.