The thing about the 9700K (which they point out) is that it doesn't support hyperthreading. Then it even beats the 9900K by a significant amount in a lot of the same tests, even though the 9900K should otherwise be the faster one, indicating the reason is that those workloads suffer a performance detriment from enabling SMT.
It should be interesting to see the results of those tests with SMT disabled.
It probably is, though they didn't explicitly state that. Windows 1903 is used, and AMD's latest strategy to improve Windows performance is in place.
Basically, if the higher clock of the 9700K can be put to use in a single-threaded application, then that chip can still come out on top. But in enough scenarios, the Ryzen 3700X and 3900X are quite competitive.
Single threaded performance isn't really that interesting anymore except for some specific gaming benchmarks, and even in gaming, you're unlikely to be bottlenecked by single threaded performance (though memory latency could be an issue).
Compiling has generally been easier to parallelize I thought? Using make -j<whatever> has been around for a long time. If you're only compiling one file then it's harder to get an improvement, but a single file should be quick anyway so there's not a huge need to speed it up. It's not like you're doing something silly and including boost are you?
In large projects, that are multiple dependency chains, that cannot be fully parallelized. There's a critical, often a bit long path, for which single threaded is still very important. Another thing is that various platforms like nodejs, etc. may not be able to utilize parallelism much, adding to the ST importance.
Firefox and chrome use a half-dozen or so threads parsing and compiling JS code so it loads quickly. Firefox's Quantum work adds a lot of threads for rendering as well. In addition, service workers, web workers, and Wasm all spawn additional processes which serve the same purpose if you aren't sharing memory directly.
Yeah the benchmarks aren't quite the clear AMD win (in performance/price) I was expecting for gaming. That said, it's important to factor in all the other stuff such as motherboards and coolers. Until there is a cheaper chipset, I expect a B550, the scales are tilted a bit further towards the 9700K. The CPU prices are intersting, but for anyone upgrading the total upgrade cost is what counts. So the minimum to compare would be CPU, cooler and motherboard.
