Rolling_Start
Banned
Whisky Lake's peak clocks are significantly higher than Ice Lake, even with Ice Lake boosting well past TDP to hit peak turbo clocks.
Somewhere well below 4 gHz Intel are hitting a brutal knee in their power curve, even more severely than AMD on TSMC 7nm. And that's probably more about process than architecture.
Even if Intel's 10nm yields are good enough for large chips now, they can't hit the frequencies necessary to compete in the high TDP server, multi socket, and highly threaded single socket markets.
Desktop 10nm is two years behind initially planned introduction, and counting.
Intel's next process is supposed to have benefited from the lessons learned with 10nm (so Intel say, and I believe them), and that'll be their chance to retake the lead.
People making games might be. And 2020 consoles will have 8 AVX2 enabled cores. A few game programmers have already talked about wanting to move their vectorised CPU stuff over to AVX but being held back by current gen consoles.
The rate at which the 9900k becomes dated compared to the 3900X and 3950X will, I think, be largely down to how fast games move away from console Jaguar and fully embrace console Zen 2 features and thread counts.
Any game that scales well across 14 or 15 threads is going to love a processor with 16 physical cores. On the bright side for Intel, cross gen games will probably give Intel breathing room through 2020 and 2021.
