As desktop user I don't care about power consumption, I care very little that it has x% more power then last year processors (at least when the x < 100) because current processors have enough power for anything you throw at them, but what I do really care is this:
-Do they still pack that PoS Intel management inside the CPU? And are these new CPU still vulnerable to Meltdown? Because if any of those questions are answered with "yes" then no amount of cores, GHz and performance % is going to change my mind from Ryzen
Well, power consumption is still kinda important on a desktop. All that power has to go somewhere and you need a cooler that can keep up or you'll be losing more performance from thermal throttling.
My current desktop water cooling setup can handle 700W under load easily. After setting it up my test was to actually spin everything up under 100% load with 2 crypto miners (1 for GPU and one for CPU, in 2014) and did it for 10 hours straight. Peak temp was 60 degree Celsius in hot July. Why I never continued with that? Because at the time bitcoin was 120 dollars and the electricity was 10 times more expensive. According to worker pool I joined at the time in those 10 hours I've earned 3 cents. Anyway, back to topic - I trust my water cooling 100% (also I made it manually because I like to build things).
I agree, it's a sad one. But compared to Intel's flurry of independent security incidents in past years, it's but a bucket in a lake.
I am not praising AMD, don't get me wrong, I am merely choosing the lesser evil. In this case the lesser evil happens to be better and cheaper. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I have no horse in the CPU race but I do have a different perspective here. I have a SFF home server with <100W cooling. I am compute-bound, have no discrete GPU, and have no interest in Meltdown as I run only trusted code. My box sports a 6-core i7 8700, and I am tempted by the 10-core i9 10900.
Why not AMD? Answer: iGPU. AMD's best iGPU offering seems to be the Ryzen 9 4900HS, which has fewer cores, and you can't just order it - it seems to be for OEMs only. So staying with Intel.
The stupid answer is that a GPU is needed to get past POST. I need graphics to boot, and nothing more.
AMD has a "NUC-gap". At the high end, there's Epyc2 datacenter offerings, and going low there's the embedded line. And every device in between either assumes a discrete GPU (Ryzen 7) or is a wimp (G-series).
I built a beefy NUC-alike based on an Intel chip, because AMD has no offerings here. Google "Ryzen NUC" and the demand is evident.
-Do they still pack that PoS Intel management inside the CPU? And are these new CPU still vulnerable to Meltdown? Because if any of those questions are answered with "yes" then no amount of cores, GHz and performance % is going to change my mind from Ryzen