“A lot of productivity PC” builds are going for $1700 Intel CPUs... really? Even if the $1700-CPU PC market was really popular, tell me: why would they choose the slower of the $1700 CPUs, other than corrupt or beurocrafic business practices?

And don’t try to argue how Intel’s $1700 18-core CPU is faster than AMD’s similarly priced 32-core CPU because Intel’s has slightly faster per-core performance. Such an argument would be absolutely absurd: the point of an 18-32 core CPU is NOT the single threaded performance :)