Fully agree on your preorderr stance.
Hartily disagree on your four change the world comments, new tech takes time to hit an installed base worth writing software for etc etc.
I won't go on it's off topic but stick to your points without the grandiose statements.
I mean Nm didn't change the world, you think that tut ,Turing was IMPOSSIBLE before 12-14nm as was Pascal and Zen and polaris.
Either intentionally or unintentionally, you missed the entire point. Don't twist the narrative. The hype never said it was going to change the world "someday", the hype was it was going to change the world upon release . It didn't then, it hasn't yet now years later and it's not going anywhere ... maybe you can update us all on what we can expect from mantle in the next 1 ... 2 ... 20 years ?
And while AMD has made some nice jumps, generation to generation, for the most part, they have not taken the lead. If a driver is behind the leader in the Indy 500 and they the 2nd place driver finishes his last lap a full 15% better than any previous lap he's ever gone, it don't matter beans if he don't cross the finish line 1st.
While cores certainly have their benefits in limited applications, they can't get around the major PC bottleneck ... that's us ... machines can multitask, we can't. CPU increases generation to generation have remained < 5% since Sandy Bridge. That's the fallacy that users love to ignore ... a legal secretary isn't going to type any more legal briefs in a day by switching to an SSD or a CPU w/ more cores.
The $285 8 core Ryzom 2700x finishes in 10th place
The $20 6 core 8400 finishes in 9th place
The two generations back 4 core 7700k finishes in 6th place
The $285 6 core 8600k finishes in 5th place
The $50 6 core 9600k finishes in 3rd place
In video editing ...
The $495 9900k which finishes 1st place in gaming beats the $600 2920X ... which is about as far as I see the hobbyist going. The $1700 32 core 2990WX and $1230 24 core 2970 WX lose to the $830 16 core 2950X in video editing ... so what happened to more cores being a panacea ? At this level, we are talking "production environment" and it's all about labor and machine time. The 16 core 9960X costs $1700 and the 16 core 2950X is $830 ... does it pay for the 6.4 % speed increase to the 9960X? In a production environment it will pay for itself in 2 -3 weeks. But, again, the hobbyist won't care and won't be investing $800 + ..
For the gamer / video hobbyists, the 9900k's 754.5 score comes at investment of $495, which certainly is an easier choice than the $600 2920x for video editing ... the 9900k is only 1.5% faster in video editing but it's 20% faster in gaming.