the equivalent chip 6 years ago was the 3950x which is the same number of cores clocked ~20% slower. if you add on ~30% ipc (for avx-512 and some general cleanups), you get a 60% speedup in 6 years which is way below the ~10x speedup between the similarly spaced Pentium 4 and Sandy bridge
Its closer to 2X faster on Chromium compile benchmark, at least the 9950X3D, and even bigger benefits for X3D in other use cases than code compiling, 9950X3D is only a few percent better than 9950X for that.
what i know is that in my particle simulations and multithreaded compilation tasks it is easily 2-10x faster. where before i could choke on 1 million particles, now im choking on 30mill.
i specifically bought this processor for its rust compilation times.
The fastest single threaded, non overclocked, commercially available cpu was the Intel i3 7350k.
I haven't seen anything bench faster than a system set up for that machine on a business board.
I think now with advancements such as AVX (the newer versions that chips like atoms don't have) the 7350k can be viewed as a power hungry pig.
I'm not sure though. The systems I purpose built using those CPUs still work great, no real significant performance issues even with current software and web. And they can use a single battery UPS.
I still have a 16 core 5950x, that is 10% faster than the 40 core xeon box it replaced, at 1/4 the wattage at the wall as my main machine.