Does Intel really think this approach is good for them? As a technical person, all I see is a company in trouble with products they need to lie about. This goes beyond market speak - it's deceptive.
The people who won't be fooled by this are likely the customers who are interested in the actual 10% difference for the high end and likely want this chip anyway.
At $499, the i9-9900k is almost competing against the 12-core Threadripper 2920x ($649, 12-core/24-threads, 4.4GHz clock, 60 PCIe lanes, quad-memory channels).
I think most people will find more use out of +4 cores (granted, on a NUMA platform) than higher clocks. Cores for compiling code, rendering, video editing, etc. etc.
Pretty much only gamers want +Clock speeds, and more and more games actually use all-cores these days (Doom, Battlefield, etc. etc.)
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That's the thing. The i9-9900k isn't even a "high end chip" anymore. Its at best, "highest of the mid-range" since the HEDT category (AMD Threadripper, or Intel-X) has been invented.
Once you start getting into 8-cores/16 threads, I start to worry about dual-memory channels and 16x PCIe lanes + 4GB/s DMI to the Southbridge. Its getting harder and harder to "feed the beast". A more balanced HEDT system (like Threadripper's quad-memory channels + 60PCIe lanes) just makes more sense.
I wish. We use a commercial path-tracer that scales very well to many cores, GPUs and entire clusters when it's chewing away at a single fixed scene or animation.
But in interactive mode many scene modifications are bottlenecked on a single or few threads and locks until it gets back into the highly optimized rendering code paths. So a lot of work goes into quickly shutting down as many background threads as possible to benefit from high turbo-boost clocks on Xeon Gold processors so the user doesn't have to wait long and then ramp them back up when it's just rendering the fixed scene.
Agreed. Games aren't the only thing people do with lots of cores / HEDT. Give me a 128 core machine and I'll happily keep them busy all day with work. No need for a heater either.