The release of the Ryzen 9 3950X marks the launch of the last high-end 3rd Gen Ryzen part. This was accompanied by the coming of the 3rd Gen Threadrippers and the Athlon 300 series set to challenge Intel’s Cascade Lake and Pentium/Celeron lineups, respectively. For the first time this decade, AMD is able to compete with Intel in every sphere from performance to power efficiency as well as thermals. According to early benchmarks, however, the Ryzen 9 3950X (a 16 core chip) offers comparable performance to Intel’s HEDT flagship, the Core i9-10980XE (an 18 core part).
As you can see, in Geekbench, the Ryzen 9 3950X manages to edge past the Core i9-10980XE. Looking at the specs, it’s not hard to digest why. The former runs at a higher frequency with a superior IPC as well as faster RAM. Just a year back, a comparable Intel CPU cost around 2 grand, and now its priced less than $1,000. The Ryzen 9 3950X will set you back for $750, quite impressive. I reckon this part is more suited for content creators and professionals than consumers.
As I already said, the Cascade Lake flagship performs either on par or better than the 3950X in most of the tests, but then loses out in the memory benchmark. If you ignore that last part, I suspect the 10980XE will come out on top, though not by much. Then again, considering that the Matisse part is a whole quarter grand cheaper, it kind of makes it hard to see the Intel chip in a positive light.