This thread seems to be more focused on "AMD is winning!!!" than the individual characteristics of either CPU?
For the first time ever, we have CPUs with brute performance (Intel's Raptor Lake chips), and CPUs with finesse (AMD's Ryzen X3D), and either approach is valid in my eyes. They'll both game hard, work hard, and take turns taking the crown - that's why they're affordable and not $1000+ each like they used to be when the Core i7 Extreme was the undisputed king.
The i9-14900K and the "14th gen" chips are the lamest thing Intel has ever come up with, but it's a move to save face: the company had no chips to release in 2023. None. This would reflect exceptionally poorly to shareholders which is the sole reason why these exist - they are unchanged vs. 13th gen counterparts, no physical changes whatsoever, no new stepping, they use the same CPUID, microcode, etc. - awarding them the disappointment thing is, IMHO, more than justified. Intel should have called these i5-13650K, i7-13750K and i9-13950K - no one would bat an eye, and they'd get the same coverage here, without the bitter disappointment of a fake generation and the stupidity of gating their APO artificially behind the 14700K and 14900K (it's so blatantly artificial that the app intentionally doesn't boot on my 13900KS - with an APO compatible motherboard and BIOS).
The new SKU with 12 E-cores (i7-14700K), makes the i7 segment more attractive (although not enough to sway people from a 7800X3D IMHO), however, you may find an arguably superior i9-13900KF with the 16 E-cores anyway for a similar price if you don't need the integrated graphics. It's just a complete and total failure by Intel's part, and it's not because the products are bad, it's because marketing is trying trying to sell existing products as something new and consumers are having none of it.
That said, having undisputed kings is undesirable. It's why Nvidia charges so much for their graphics cards (and AMD somehow screws up even when they have good hardware due to their laughably bad, feature incomplete, unoriginal and unstable graphics drivers) and why Intel charged so much for their CPUs before.
