Within minutes of this unrealistic, pre-release, result appearing on userbenchmark, AMD’s marketing machinery declared a 20% victory over the 12900K whilst simultaneously slandering userbenchmark via hundreds of “news” outlets and thousands of supposedly disinterested twitter, reddit, forum and youtube accounts. Buying new AMD products is like buying used cars: it takes time, experience and a taste for sales hype. It’s difficult for consumers to make rational choices because AMD completely dominates “news” and social media channels. Ten years ago, when AMD was the underdog, this type of marketing was understandable. Today, with a capitalization of $150 Billion USD, it’s disrespectful to AMD's own users. Even with Intel's marketing department permanently asleep at the wheel, If these practices continue, Ryzen may eventually end up in the same state as Radeon. Following a series of overhyped releases, consumers have little interest in the Radeon brand. The combined market share for all AMD’s (discrete) Radeon RX 5000 and 6000 GPUs (Jun ’22 Steam stats) is just 2%. Meanwhile, Nvidia’s RTX 2060 alone accounts for 5%. If Zen 4 actually delivers anywhere near a 57% real-world single core uplift, we will bow down, call AMD king, and commit seppuku! AMD’s new architecture is, once again, optimized to shine in specific benchmarks. Realistically, even if Zen 4 only catches Intel's 12th gen. (Alder Lake) in a handful of real-world scenarios, it will be a big step forward for AMD. A few weeks after Zen 4 (est. Sep 27), Intel’s 13th gen. (Raptor Lake) is scheduled to launch. Smart shoppers will do well to wait until then, before considering a purchase. Despite AMD’s Neanderthal marketing techniques, it’s hard not to admire the speed of their technical progress. AMD-Raptor-4 and Intel-Zen-13 would be better fitting product names. ^{[Jul '22 CPUPro]}

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