But those independent tests are inevitable and probably right at or right after launch. Does AMD stand to gain anything by falsifying test results that are (relatively) easy to fact check independently?

I mean, no one should lose their minds over it right now or anything, but it seems impressive. I certainly don't see an upside to giving bogus stats right now.

I'd be more likely to believe Geekbench is just a terrible, broken benchmark than anything else.

An Epyc 7501 (32c/64t) apparently only gets 17k multicore score on geekbench under windows: https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/2141

Which is hilariously wrong. And if you think that's some quirk of Epyc, well, same CPU gets 65k when run under Linux: https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/10782563 So clearly there's a software issue in play. Maybe this is related to the new Windows scheduler change. Maybe geekbench just has some pathologically bad behavior. Who knows.

So yes we should wait for release & independent testing before getting too excited, even if that's just so we get numbers from something other than geekbench.

The memory path for current/prior Threadripper is a pretty well known issue, and likely the cause of the disparity. It may or may not have been an issue in other types of workloads. The new memory path is more consistent, slightly slower than best case for prior gen, but huge leap forward for Zen 2 considering the better handling for higher clocks on RAM.

AMD have the benefit of process shrink, architecture improvements, and no NUMA this time.

I find myself drawn to these new chips and news, but you're absolutely right - we need to be skeptical here. But I really want to believe. Either way, I wont be ordering until I see a lot of real 3rd party benchmarks.