Intel new 8th-generation & AMD Threadripper CPU's !

I think the best bank for the buck is the 6-core AMD Ryzen 5 1600 that is under $200 at some places .

Cyber Power PC sells AMD Ryzen gaming PCs from $599 4-core to $4175 16-core .

I'm still running my AMD hex core machine - it's almost 7 years old now and plenty fast for what I do.

Still, in retrospect, I think I would have been better served if I had gone with only 4 cores and higher clock speed. Some of the new designs can run all those 12 cores at full speed for long - they get too hot.

Found this online:

The other reason foundry die shrinks aren’t as interesting as they used to be is for the simple reason that they don’t deliver much in the way of improved performance any more, at least not outside specific market segments. Six years ago, the Core i5-2537M was a Sandy Bridge-era core clocked at 1.4GHz base / 2.3GHz Turbo with a TDP of 17W. Today, Intel’s Core i5-7300U is a 15W chip with a 2.6GHz base clock and a 3.5GHz Turbo. It’s TDP is 15W. Intel, in other words, improved the base clock by 1.86x and the boost clock by 1.52x all while trimming the TDP.

But in the desktop space, performance gains have been rarer, overclocking headroom has shrunk, and frequency gains have been doled out very sparingly. Intel has absolutely made progress over this time, but not at anything like a quick pace. Again, that’s not the company’s fault — it’s related, as we’ve said before, more to the difficulties with scaling silicon than anything — but with AMD surging back into the CPU fight, Intel may find itself under increased pressure to demonstrate that its 10nm hardware can do more than look impressively futuristic in a variety of graphs.

For "Joe Average" (i.e not doing computional fluid dynamics calculation or trying to run some game at super high frame rate on a super high resolution screen), more than 4 cores is probably a waste of money !

What AMD is very good at is low cost and embedded graphics (the current generation of Ryzgen chips do NOT have embedded graphics). You will "feel" good graphics more than more cores on common tasks like web surfing or watching videos or even office automation tasks. Of course, all the new boards will use DDR4.

The other "cool" thing is NVM Express (NVMe). It is a SSD on a card that plugs into a PCIe slot on your motherboard. The driver makes it look like a SATA disk. Even a 1 lane PCIe NVMe is much faster than SATA 3.1. Rotational storage is pretty much just for backup and "bulk" storage.

I agree, I am waiting for 10nm.
Intel 10nm

I'm disappointed Intel continues to hold back moving to a 10nm process. I guess they want to milk the billions invested in the existing 14nm process for another generation. Incremental structural refinements and process improvements are fine and all, but the real magic comes from a die shrink which is still on the back burner I guess.