Even if the real world perf is close to the $1K Intel chips it will be a win. It's going to force price cuts from Intel and hopefully spark some competition again.
I'm guessing that adopting these lower priced chips without lowering prices would have a negligible impact on sales for Apple if the performance is as good as AMD claims.
If I remember correctly, you'd have to get permission to add Thunderbolt support into drivers....
Depends, I suppose, on how much AMD chooses to undercut on pricing.
E.g. see http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1826?vs=1729 (6900k vs. 7700k) - there are quite a few relevant workloads where the 8 core loses significantly to the 4-core. Even stuff where you'd think more cores are really natural (such as POV-ray), the perf advantage of the 8-core over the 4-core is less than 50% (!). For an example where fewer faster cores obviously win, consider web-browsers: the 4-core is 36% faster in google octane v2.
Servers that have lots of independant tasks, on the other hand, will love this cheap many-cores. And coincidentally, servers often don't use AVX all that much anyhow.
If you pick a comparison where the clock speed isn't so far apart, things look different: http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1832?vs=1729
Of course, fewer cores usually means a higher available clock speed. Just pointing out it's not just "code isn't parallel enough" that drives the disparity.
To be specific: you can't get the equivalent of a 7700k with eight cores - the 6900k is (AFAIK) the next best thing, and by the looks of it, ryzen for all it's revolutionary improvements wrt bulldozer, is not all that different from a 6900k. AMD's own numbers place it at an identical single core perf.
If you're lucky enough to primarily be bottlenecked on parallel stuff: go nuts, of course!
In any case, I don't want to suggest I'm not happy with AMD finally being a real competitor, I'm just trying to temper expectations of intel-beating world domination. Most users aren't so lucky. Many people use laptops, and slow websites are more of a problem than slow handbrake sessions. For me, it's visual studio and various build/run cycles. Sure, some tools use more cores with the right settings, but it typically scales really disappointingly after around 2 or so. That overclocked 5820K would probably lose to a stock 7700k in my workload, and that's just annoying.
Now, just need a refresh on the GTX 1080, so that 4K gaming can be consistent at >= 60fps.
ASIDE: I've been using nvenc with vbr2 for h.265 with very good results (but about 10-15% larger than roughly equivalent x265).