I agree, but as an x399 2990WX will be the end of the line and therefore no reason to lower the prices, like was the case with 4790k. 2990WX loses many benchmarks to 3900x, 3960x should demolish it most of the time.
Reinforcement learning might be a good use case for 2990WX.
It seems like people benefit from the higher clocks and lower latencies from the 16-core 2950x. I pretty much consider the 2950x to be the end-of-the-line for typical use cases... with the 2990wx only really used for render-boxes.
> Reinforcement learning might be a good use case for 2990WX.
Hmm, the 2990wx is better than the 2950x for that task, but the 3960x has 256-bit AVX2 vectors. Since the 2990wx only has 128-bit AVX2 vectors, I would place my bets on the cheaper, 24-core 3960x instead.
Doubling the SIMD-width in such a compute-heavy problem would be more important than the +12 cores that the 2990wx offers.
EDIT: The 3960x also fixes the latency issues that the 2990wx has, so its acceptable to use the 3960x in general-use case scenarios (aka: video games). The latency-issue made the 2990wx terrible at playing video games.
Yeah, no one is buying these HEDTs for "purely" gaming tasks, but any "creative" individual who does video rendering during the week, but plays Counterstrike on the weekend, needs a compromise machine that handles both high-core counts AND high-clock speeds for the different workloads.
2990WX is pretty bad for most use cases. Its only good for rendering.
The 24-core 3960x probably is better due to lower latency, and better balanced I/O.