But as long as it stays under the $1100 of the 6900K I think they can secure the mid to high-end enthusiast grade market which is good because I am tired of intel controlling that portion of the market
This chip definitely seems rad, don't get me wrong--I just think the enthusiast market is sensitive to what this isn't, at present, doing.
If you want 6 cores you can get a 6800k for $150 more, but it also has a higher TDP and requires a more expensive motherboard (X99 vs Z170 chipset). This is going to put the total price up by at least $300.
As you say most games still favour single-core performance so paying extra isn't worth it. DX12 and Vulkan will start to change that though, so let's see...
If they can't reach at least 4ghz it wouldn't matter.
Games are not optimized well beyound 3-4 cores these days I can disable 2-3 cores on my 6 core CPU and maybe lose 5% fps in CPU intensive games.
Intel can push their clocks pretty darn high especially with OC which now comes out of the box with every enthusiast grade motherboard.
If you end up having a 3.4ghz part going against a 4.5ghz part the 4 extra cores might not matter.
Even in professional use cases adobe doesn't scale above 4 threads like at all and many video encoders also don't scale some even don't scale beyond 2.
The only thing that really scales well universally is 3D rendering.
For ANNs you want as many threads as possible I would think.
Xeon SOCs and what ever AMD would pull out to compete with 48 and 64 thread parts would probably be something quite different than this.
I've mostly used open source encoders, but they all scaled well with more cores, and the Adobe suite has come a long way. It wouldn't make sense for a heavy user to get anything less than 6-8 cores using Adobe.
Heck, even 99% of the "tech media" didn't notice (or didn't care to make a big deal out of it) when Intel swapped Core-based Celerons and Pentiums for significantly weaker, but much more profitable to build, Atoms. The consumers never stood a chance against Intel's progressive rip-off.
Let's see how the market settles in 2-3 years, after the Zen architecture is fleshed out across device lines, and after Qualcomm commences its entrance in the notebook market with 50%-100% of "Core i7" performance (depending on which Core i7 [1]).
[1] http://www.laptopmag.com/articles/intel-renames-core-m-core-...