[shereadsthenews]

The 9980XE is just a really large/fast Skylake CPU. Skylake is years old. If you wanted this level of performance from Intel you could have ordered the Xeon Gold 6154 way back in 2017. It seems fair to call this a 2-year-old part.

A more comparable part would be the i9-9980HK.

[leetcrew]

> A more comparable part would be the i9-9980HK

not really, that's an eight core CPU (and also a mobile part). I'm very interested to see how the lower core count Ryzen 2s compare to their Intel counterparts in single-thread, but part of what's so impressive about the (early) 3900X/3950X results is that they offer this kind of performance with more cores and at a consumer-friendly price point.

you're right that Skylake is an old design at this point, but intel invites this kind of comparison when they can't manage to ship an HCC version of their latest tech. entirely fair, imo.

[shereadsthenews]

True, Intel's part numbering scheme has passed beyond all reason. Think about the i9-9900K/KF. Existing SKU, in stock at Newegg for $479. You don't get quite as many cores but you get a lower price and higher single-core performance, and it exists right now instead of being unobtainable hypeware.

[leetcrew]

like I said, I'm very interested to see the head-to-heads, especially the overclocking results. my use case is c++ compilation and csgo so it looks like it'll be a tough choice.

[shereadsthenews]

Seems like for C++ builds you are always going to want the most cores for the money, even if the single core performance is a little worse.

[justsid]

> The 9980XE is just a really large/fast Skylake CPU. Skylake is years old.

Unfortunately larger and slightly refined Skylakes is all that Intel ships these days on Desktop. If it’s unfair to compare Ryzen CPUs to that, then I’m afraid there is no fair comparison that can be made until Intel gets around making actually new CPUs.