Yes, I can be serious and I really don't like your tone towards me. Always unpleasant so how about you lighten up a bit eh? No need for unpleasantness regardless of who's technical point is right or wrong.
I think Intel will care about the gaming market, even a niche one as it's all about prestige and image, which helps to bring in the sales.
There really is no prestige in the HEDT segment. Actually it's not very well known outside of communities like this one. We're so far in the notebook revolution, most people won't even be able to name the LGA1151 socket. Or the last time they've seen a desktop CPU live...
Intel makes almost no marketing campaigns about X299 (same with X99 before). Their "flagship" CPU for gaming is 7700K. Huge Xeon lineup covers workstations and servers. HEDT lineup is mostly to suck some money from geeks and recycle some failed Xeon dies.
This is also why previous HEDT CPUs had bonkers pricing. They really didn't care whether the CPUs sell or not.
Intel won't invest big money on bringing out a new platform they "don't care about", that's just silly. More likely they're not sure how to react to the Threadripper threat which is why we have these anomalies with Skylake-X and the next generation will be much better.
But they haven't invested big money into X299. This is pretty obvious once you look at the specs...
![Smile :) :)](https://tpucdn.com/forums/data/assets/smilies/smile-v1.gif)
They just used things they had. Skylake and KabyLake are so good they actually might release one more generation just by tweaking and clocking higher - we know this because there is still some decent OC headroom (unlike Ryzen which is clocked near the limit).
New high-end Xeons, on the other hand, are pretty advanced. It's a first "socket" implementation of Knights Landing - something we could actually call "next-gen" CPU.
How can you say for certain that AMD won't allow their CPUs to be unlocked? On what authority are you basing that on, or is that just your opinion? I'm saying maybe/hopefully and that's the best we can do at the moment.
Because the other 2 modules are not functional dies.
Well... it's 8 channels sort of... It's 2 channels per die.