12 core 5900X outperforms the 16 core 3950X in multimedia AVX2. Likely with an extra FPMUL & FPADD unit in combination with an extra Load and extra Store unit.
Indeed, that extra FP unit is giving AMD the performance crown in Cinebench R20, due to the extra AVX unit. Will be the same in a lot of rendering loads.
In contrast to smartphone designs which lean more to integer operations.
All those cores and all of that throughput, Zen 3 is going to be really impressive for heavy compute workloads like encoding/transcoding and rendering.
Speaking of which, Anandtech needs to update their benchmarking suite for Zen 3. Why are they still using such an old version of Handbrake?
*edit* They used a newer version for the Tiger Lake review, but for desktop CPUs it seems they still use an older version.
If you look at Phoronix, they have the most comprehensive test for desktop and server use cases. For me who is more interested in server and dev type loads it is my go to place for benchmarks.
openbenchmarking.org
If you look there, they got most of the things that are actually real world applications in a server environment and dev machines. Also for desktop use cases they have a bunch of common frameworks and apps.
If you dont like the way the benchmark is done you can fork and make changes yourself.
If AMD can get to a new node, they should have a nice power and space budget to improve in a lot of other respects in "IPC"
But it is not going to be revolutionary.
Something outside of the box has to happen for that.