I don't think there's much of a need to uplift core counts yet. With intel losing Hyper-threading, that might give AMD some multi-threaded breathing room that Intel's been pressuring against heavily with their e-core developments which, despite the criticism, are incredibly space efficient for multi-threaded tasks. And if the stated IPC uplifts of 16% for AMD and 14% for Intel pan out, AMD should do just fine in single threaded and gaming still.
The big question on my mind is this; the 7800X3D was a nice uplift over the 5800X3D, and Zen 5 is looking to be a bigger IPC uplift over Zen 4 than Zen 4 was over Zen 3, but how much of that was due to the DDR5 ecosystem? So how much will the 9800X3D offer over the 7800X3D? Time will tell.
While core count didn't go up, I'm loving the lower TDP numbers. Maybe they wanted to balance performance uplift with that this time around. In a world where everything is going up, up, up in power draw, this is nice. The X3Ds are already incredibly efficient in performance per watt in gaming (shout-out to the 7900 non-X in particular for multi-threaded stuff too), so if they get better? Yes, please. Maybe Zen 6 (which might end up on AM5 afterall given the recent update to 2027+ support for it) or Zen 7 will be when we see cores per CCD go up. Gaming doesn't need more than 16 cores (even over 6 or 8 is a luxury and not a necessity). The consoles are 8/16 and this will be fine for the foreseeable future. For multi-threaded tasks, higher options on both sides exist so it's not like when we were stuck in the quad core era.
As an outsider looking in, I dislike the division it causes. A CPU specifically made just for games, but it can do other stuff ok.
I would prefer a CPU that can do it all, just like what we had before
As an insider who owns one, I dislike how locked down the CPU is, as I prefer to tune manually. If I wanted a Dell I would have bought one
Outside of that, it isn't a bad CPU, and pretty easy to cool. And the performance at lower resolutions is pretty good..
I don't like the mindset that the X3D chips can only play games and suffer massively outside of it. That's false. A Zen 3 based chip with extra cache can do productivity just about as well as a Zen 3 chip without. It's slightly worse due to the lower clock speeds, but it's not much. The fact that the cache doesn't help everything doesn't make it worse for it.
Of course, from a buying perspective, if you wanted productivity gains, you wouldn't spend extra money on a chip with extra cache that won't help performance in those situations. It doesn't make the chip a bad performer at those things, though.
I'd also like offer a counterpoint to the bold part; those chips we had before couldn't do it all, could they? They were obviously leaving performance in select scenarios on the table by lacking cache! Designing a chip is a balancing act. The fact that v-cache options exist, even if they don't help everything, is good! It's choice for consumers! We need more of that, not less.
I'm so in love with my 5800X3D (came from a 3700X, so only on generation older) that as long as these are offered, I'll probably never go back to a non-high cache chip. This thing has been an unbelievable uplift in certain scenarios (Minecraft is a good example) as well as the 1% low uplifts that the small "20%" uplift over the standard 5800X is actually understated.
With Intel still dealing with moving to a non-monolithic chip, I'm looking forward to them bringing their own high cache options out in later generations, as opposed to AMD "burying" theirs. As of right now, they have zero to do that unless they want to cede the gaming crown back to Intel. So I'll be looking at the 9800X3D (or whatever it's called) and then hoping Intel and AMD both continue to innovate, or I'll simply go with whoever has the best option later on.
As for overclocking, I already didn't do that on my 3700X so the X3D's loss there doesn't impact me at all. CPUs and GPUs have gotten good at boosting to their limits, and this cuts in on the attraction of overclocking for the lazy casuals like me.