So we've got a bit of news lately. First of all, Skylake-X continues to be a fucking joke.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/09/intel-core-i9-7960x-review/The i9-7960X has a MASSIVE jump in performance of......... 20% over Threadripper 1950X. For 80% more money. And it still has the 7900X's thermal issues.
I don't really think I can add anything with just how bad the Skylake-X lineup has been. AMD is eating Intel's lunch here.
More interestingly, however, we have the first Coffee Lake reviews. Intel finally switches to six cores, 12 threads with the new i7s. Well, at the very least, we finally have an Intel release that isn't laughable or nearly pointless.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/10/intel-coffee-lake-8700k-review/The good: The extra cores means that it is a legitimate upgrade from Kaby Lake, which had an average of about 8% increased performance from Sky Lake, but Ryzen still beats it out in most multi-thread applications. It closes the gap somewhat, but we're still looking at Ryzen being a better choice for multi-threaded performance and Core being a better choice for single-threaded performance. At least now we have legitimate competition.
The bad: Thanks for giving me literally no upgrade path, Intel. Glad to see you don't care about futureproofing. Coffee Lake does not support Sky Lake or Kaby Lake motherboards. Now, you might think it's because it uses a new socket and physically wouldn't fit in older boards. Nope. It still uses the LGA 1151 socket. So they've basically told anyone looking to buy to buy AMD if they care about long term support.
Less importantly, I've seen inconsistent reports of thermal efficiency. Power consumption is higher, but that's not a surprise for a chip that has more cores and was probably rushed out a bit faster than it should have (remember, Kaby Lake came out in January). The prices are a bit silly. They're asking for $170... for the i3-8350k. For comparison, the i3-7320k, the Kaby Lake equivalent, is only $130. Granted, that's the most extreme price jump, but the prices are increased across the board for the most part.
All in all, this is a good release, so long as you don't care about being brickwalled in a year or two. Now I'm curious what next generation Ryzen is going to look like.