3950X is going to be good at productivity but Intel is still faster per-core and the 10980XE packs in 2 more cores. It's also more expensive, of course - there's a place for the 3950X here, just don't expect to see the 3950X handily best a 10980XE despite being short by 2 cores.
The 3950X is just a 3900X with more cores, and we already know Zen2 pretty much just matches Intel in the best case and loses in many other cases. There is not enough architectural lead there to account for a (32,082 / 25,838) x (18/16) = 39.6% per-core performance lead in favor of AMD. Guaranteed.
It's an erroneous test. It happens a lot with pre-release leaks, Zen has had a lot of timer bugs at launch. Or it's an LN2 run on the 3950X and an engineering sample 10980XE, or something like that.
In a more realistic set of tests, with a 50% core deficit and mitigations enabled, Intel's geomean score is 6% lower than AMD's. They're not 40% behind AMD in per-core performance.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=3900x-99...