I realize I am in the minority (a big minority), but I honestly wanted a 16 core/24 thread or better that was efficient. My 142 watt 5950x's are killing it in DC, and my EPYC's do geat, but the cheap ones have dried up, so now I want cheap and lots of threads. BTW, I run mine 24/7/365@100% load, so efficiency is a must.
Hell yeah, I am well aware of your beasties and find them invariably impressive, and for VERY good purpose. I'd take one MarkFW over all the miners in the world, you're putting that badass hardware to very real benefit for all of us.
I see a lot of parallels between this recent series of CPUs and the previous tit for tat eras in the industry. The 10900K and 11900K especially remind me of 'Emergency Edition' P4EE lol. A very decent uarch and mature process pushed beyond sanity in an effort to offer at least *something* against the megacore competition on better process tech, and the results were entirely questionable (arguably the only reason for them to exist was extremely poor availability of Zen3, and even then they're still poor value/perf for the vast vast majority of people over an i7 or perhaps even i5 in the case of typical gamers).
The 12900K, I'm hesitant to put in the same category one way or the other until I see what it's like in more sane guise (say set at 5Ghz/4Ghz all core, with good DDR4, and on a decent air cooler). There seems to be something akin to a parabolic efficiency loss in chasing those last few hundred Mhz, though I know for a lot of 'Halo' enthusiast types, they're much less concerned with raw efficiency vs 'look at this record score on whatever'.
Interesting times.