What excactly is the software where a 7960x makes sense vs a 32c TR or a 6c kbl with higher freq?
In reality it for 90% resides to extreme wider fpu use and therefore the software where Intel HEDT portfolio makes sense is as slim as mindfactory numbers indicate.
Intel HEDT line is in no mans land.
And the reason is excactly the monolitic die and resulting cost. And no - 16c monolitic die and wide 512b fpu isnt suddenly the perfect sweetspot. Its probably exactly what is dragging Intel down in that market.
I got the 7960X because I encode videos almost daily basis using HEVC.
The typical scenario is to encode 80-160k frames using constant rate control and aggressive motion estimation and rate distortion settings.
Most often the material still has =< 1080 vertical resolution, 4K is quite rare.
Due to the codec characteristics, you can efficiently utilize < 12 cores while encoding material with 1080 vertical resolution.
In theory you should be able to utilize ~ 17 cores at 1080 resolution (64 CTU), however in practice the scaling takes a nose dive beyond 10 cores.
Thanks to the AVX2 / AVX512 implementations in HEVC, Skylake-X has almost 50% higher IPC in it than Summit or Pinnacle Ridge.
That's a vast difference, even without mentioning the slightly higher clocks Skylake-X can simultaneously achieve.
The more modern video encoders (HEVC, VP9, etc) generally do not favor higher core count.
To maximise the efficiency the tile sizes have been increased, and that limits the number of cores you can utilize based on the vertical resolution of the video.
Obviously 4K and higher resolutions solve the issue, however such material is still extremely rare compared to FullHD or lower resolutions.
So it should be pretty obvious why I got myself a 7960X for which I paid 1700$, instead of using the 1950X which I got for free.