Base Clock doesn't really mean anything. At the very least the "stock" turbos are an interesting indicator, and if you want to be more complete - the actual operating clocks for typical setups (ie. on "average" cooling). If you can turbo a 7900X to 4.5GHz on an AIO, you can be sure to get the 12-core to over 4GHz on the same setup.

That's not a correct way to assess performance differences.

Bit offtopic, but imagine HBM(1-2)memory on MB and you you could add more, No more E-Atx mobo just more lanes for PCI-E for size of one DIMM you could have 256 GB memory, I'm not an engineer... Possibility ?

Depends on the workload. VM's and stuff obviously want more cores per socket, rendering probably the same, etc. Office apps/gaming are more difficult to thread to 8+ cores, there just is no advantage, you have to wait for the slowest operation that may not be threadable to render the frame. Problem is that IPC increases are extremely difficult to find. Zen seems like a nice boost, but in reality it's mostly just copying the best parts of what Intel already had. Zen+ might also get a nice boost (10% IPC, will probably get more from higher clocks on 7nm) but going forward I think you're going to see AMD hit the same problems Intel has - marginal gains year over year in actual performance. I think the future will have to come from a combination of material science breakthroughs for transistor scaling and/or perhaps a paradigm shift in computing to either Optical/Biological. I actually feel like all the recent MCM designs would be a good test bed for doing optical interconnects for package to package communication. The transit latency would be much lower, power requirements lower and bandwidth significantly increased. The next 10 years or so is going to be either really boring for computing or really interesting.

AMD doubling Desktop CPU cores and decreasing price by 75% this year in desktop and HEDT and planning 48 cores on 7nm effectively doubling what is current intel maximum core Xeons on Zen2 is not something I would call boring. Also, clocks on 7nm should get better, maybe 16 core at 4.2GHz using bellow 140W does not seem to be unrealistic.

If they separated crap from directors and janitors, then maybe there is a chance that crap between IHS and CPU can be high quality product on these CPUs. Otherwise, I doubt they will reach 4 GHz on all cores easily... I am sorry if I offended someone in a process, but that is the best way to describe intel's TIM.

"The next 10 years" is not this year and given the context of my post I think it's pretty obvious that I was talking about massive technological shifts in computing, not more cores at cheaper prices - which AMD has done for a while now, they just finally made the cores good. Edit: And honestly I don't even find the more cores at cheaper pricing that interesting. It's cool for servers, maybe people doing some render work and whatnot - but for the vast majority of customers single threaded performance is what effects them and that's stagnated for years now and there doesn't seem to be any indication of that changing.

Bit offtopic, but imagine HBM(1-2)memory on MB and you you could add more, No more E-Atx mobo just more lanes for PCI-E for size of one DIMM you could have 256 GB memory, I'm not an engineer... Possibility ?

Its a classic catch-22 The apps aren't developped for Multi-core CPU's (4+), because there aren't a lot of them out there. To get the Multicore CPU's out there, there needs to be software. At least now, developpers are more likely to develop software for 4+ cores.

You are forgetting that the number of "casual" content creators has increased dramatically in the last years. - Many gamers now stream or record/upload their gaming sessions - More and more youtubers recording whatever they like - People have many multimedia capable devices, and they might like to reencode video to play on the go - Services like PLEX are allowing your family members and friends to watch your media from their devices anytime. Guess what that one uses ? CORES ! Lots - Games themselves are becoming more and more threaded, because the way the new generation consoles work ( 8-cores ) - New software that sorts your photo collection automatically (content recognition) ... and I could continue for a very long post. These many-cores CPUs are more needed than ever, and the ONLY REASON people are not using them is because Intel's prices have been so damn high for their HEDT platform, making it inaccessible for most. Thanks again AMD for propelling us into the new age of many-cores !

Quite frankly i don´t think the problems is the adoption rate of CPUs with more than 4 cores. The problem is that we already have CPUs better than we already need for more "mundane" tasks like browsing, using Office, watch movies or streaming and so on. For that any modern dual core is enough and the possible gains for using more cores to perform such tasks are minimal or meaningless. Minimal because in many cases using 8 cores instead of 2 or 4 cores only brings a 10% performance increase and meaningless because certain tasks are already executed so fast that making them even faster is useless. Just imagine a program that takes 1 second to execute with 2 cores and then the same program being executed in half the time or less with a 10 core CPU... Bottom line, no matter how powerfull CPUs may be in the future, for 90% of our normal usage of a PC, all that power is simply useless...

We need more games to even utilize this stuff. The i7 8700K seems like a sweet spot to me. Six cores 12 Threads, I personally like that idea.

This^.....how much will 8700k cost?

I was pondering this as well.... i7 7700K 4c/8t at say 330 so the 8700K with 50% more cores/threads should be, what, 499? Knowing Intel though, call it 599. Either way to expensive.

You are right, more cores => More concurrent attempts to access memory => Lower performance. But maybe you meant something else. Please elaborate. Maybe you can create something complex and very accurate.

I won't bother with the technicalities but I will point on one super simple thing you did not account for. 7900x only has 3.3 base clock. That is a guaranteed clock speed from intel. Real world is quite different, pretty much every single 7900x turbos in all cores at 4ghz minimum. Some will do up to 4,5 depending on setup. So you can expect similar results with this 12core doing 3.8ghz minimum turbo to up to 4.2~ or so. TLDR base clock means absolutely nothing.

Worst case scenario:

I won't bother with the technicalities but I will point on one super simple thing you did not account for. 7900x only has 3.3 base clock. That is a guaranteed clock speed from intel. Real world is quite different, pretty much every single 7900x turbos in all cores at 4ghz minimum. Some will do up to 4,5 depending on setup. So you can expect similar results with this 12core doing 3.8ghz minimum turbo to up to 4.2~ or so. TLDR base clock means absolutely nothing.

Little flashback on most important part of given post.

A 400 MHz drop is a pretty significant difference, and it suggest that the 7920X will come nowhere close to the 7900X in OC headroom (if it did, they would have set the base clock much higher). So, instead of 4 GHz on all cores like the 7900X it might only be able to do 3.6 GHz. The only way that the base clock would not matter is if it had no impact on OC headroom whatsoever.

That's natural when core count is increased. Just compare last gen 5960 to 5930k 3.0 vs 3.5 base clock. Real world even with OC they clock the same. Base clock is reduced for power envelope The same happens for broadwell-e. 10 core clocks the same as the 6 cores.