AMD Ryzen vs Intel CPUs

The Ryzen 9 3950X is about half the price and almost as fast (single core). For sheer performance, there’s not much marginally faster for a reasonable increase in price. (3970X is 2.5% faster at 50% more expensive, the EPYC 7742 is several times more expensive but not significantly faster.)

The Ryzen 1700 has 8/16 and much better performance compared to the mentioned Xeon E3. I think the Ryzen 5's would be the ones to look out for (still more cores and much less price), hope they push the power consumption even lower.

performance and TDP, intel do worse than AMD, both GPU and CPUs

That’s only 6x more than my 5600x

the thing is those 4000 cpus are really 3000 ones. intels laptops are always 1 gen ahead. amds laptop is always one gen behind. its kinda annoying. granted zen 2 (or 3000) was a good architecture so it should compete nicely but I would expect intel to actually be more efficient still because its newer.

That Ryzen chip has 20% slower single thread performance, which is what really matters for desktop workloads

Isn't the ryzen 9 3950x 16core as well, but with a much lower TDP? (Whatever that means in this case). Comparing tdp is pretty useless.

a gamer would wind up with worse power efficiency from an intel CPU because of how much wattage they draw under load, there's a reason i'm on ryzen and not core atm

If you're willing to accept inflation since the early 90s check out something like the 5600G instead of the top end models like the 5950X, or wait for the low end SKUs of Alder lake to come out too. The 5600G is a fantastic new 6 core CPU that will handle all but the most extreme multithreaded workloads with ease while staying under 100 Watts.

FWIW, the AMD FX-8320 (8 cores) is around half as fast as the i7-5960X, but costs one seventh of the Intel CPU ($150 vs $1050).