It seems AMD's retail partners have dropped the price of the R9 5950X in recent days, providing even more motivation to go the Ryzen route.

This price cut puts the 16-cores and 32-threaded CPU on nearly the same financial footing as the Core i9-12900K (8 perf cores and 8 energy-efficient cores / 24 Threads). We feel AMD's price is now correct, given the Zen 3-powered Ryzen 9 5950X has no further upgrade route. The Ryzen 7000 Series will launch on a new platform dubbed as Socket AM5, whereas Intel will reuse LGA1700 for forthcoming Raptor Lake Core i9s, albeit with a probable microcode and BIOS upgrade to enable existing 600 series motherboards.

Because Intel is moving to a new socket and prefers the 12900K to be coupled with pricey DDR5 memory, platform considerations and memory options play a role in the overall decision, and at 610 EUR / 38 bucks per core it might just hit a certain sweet spot. Please note that we're seeing ~10% drops on other Ryzen processors also.