Right? I assembled a number crunching machine for $1200 a few months ago. The 3900X was under $400 at the time. I can’t imagine spending an extra 50% on a comparable machine just say I can say it has Intel Inside.

I was upgrading a year or so ago, after the Spectre and Meltdown were discovered and patched by essentially slowing down CPUs. Went with AMD and never looked back.

At this point though intel has slashed their price/core to be competitive if not better than threadripper. They don't have anything that compete in core count, but if you look at the 9980/10980 series with 18 cores, its very competitive on a price basis per core with the 24/32/64 core threadrippers. If you want max cores then you still need to go with threadripper but if 18 is enough, i don't get all the hate 10980 gets. There are certain linear algebra related workloads where the intels excel and why I would probably go with the 10980x were I to upgrade (which im probably not, 4 year old pc doing fine)

I was very hesitant due to past experiences with AMD over 20 years, especially drivers.

I ended up going with a Ryzen 9 though & it's been flawless so far. Great performance. Wouldn't look at an Intel anytime in the near future for a CPU.

If I build a new computer to replace my Ivy Bridge hackintosh, the only thing that would keep me on Intel at this point is the desire to build one last hackintosh before Apple goes full ARM. At the middle level, say Ryzen 3700X vs i7-9700, they're pretty close.