[blattimwind]

> Meanwhile, pointing at memory latency as the flaw in Ryzen has been a popular misdirection for a while now.

How is it a misdirection? The data is accurate and memory latency scaling is a well-known issue for simulations like e.g. games (which is a huge market for high end desktop CPUs and also the market 90 % of reviews address), where you can't really explain the performance differences just by higher clocks. It's considered the main reason why much older Intel CPUs can still outperform Ryzen CPUs in games.

On the other hand, if you take something like Cinebench you can literally turn XMP off (thus using JEDEC timings and bus speed) and still get almost the same score (within, say, 2 %). That's because Cinebench is benchmarking pretty much only ALU throughput. That's obviously an important factor for performance, but just as obviously not the only one.