But giving the finger to whom? Intel? Or their own customers?
Pretty much everyone near as I can tell. They put out a 5ghz cpu with an AIO water cooler that takes a crazy amount of unapologetic juice for cripes sake. If that wasn't a really funny middle finger I don't know what was. Maybe there extreme and edgy now, I'm old and can't tell.
I'm amused and OK with it though myself, in no small part because I'm very happy with my 8350.
Benchmarks are fine and interesting and all that, and it's another story if one is trying to do something that really needs serious single threaded power, but for what I do this thing is comically fast. Almost all modern CPU's are. I still have fifty tabs open in firefox, I still play crazy games, I do some light 3d junk for work and a ton of light image work, I spend 18 hours a day in front of this thing, and it's really fine, with an ssd and a bunch of ram I'm never waiting on the processor. If fact my cpu spends most of it's time half asleep. And it was cheap. For a less than consumer computer anyway. I didn't notice my power bill go up, and I do watch it, and it runs cool with an "enthusiast" grade cooler and case. I can't find anything to complain about, other than I want a 9590 for $200 or under just so I can say I have it. If I could have waded through the two hundred Intel motherboards out there and made sense of there processor naming scheme, I might have got out with some sort of midrange chip and board that was the same price or not much more, but I'd really rather have something higher end and more "neat" than something pedestrian just because it's a little faster. That's personal preference though, but I suspect others share it.
Sometimes I look up some benches for a "fast" cpu from ten years ago that we did all the same stuff with that we do today on a day to day bases for some perspective.
I keep an old socket 478 3.2ghz HT P4 box in my garage for netflix and music while I'm working. That was a relatively fast computer in it's day. And it's faster than the dual P2's I rocked for a long time. It'd be cool to see AMD competitive with intel on the high end, but I keep myself anti-jaded enough that it's not too big a bummer.
That's my holistic approach to the whole thing.