I agree they're a gen behind.

However, my thesis statement would be, that's not that big a deal for 99% of people:

- CPU speeds aren't increasing quickly anymore. Last gen and current gen are often like 20% different.

- Most people (should?) care more about "Best performance I can get, for the price I can afford." You have $100/$200 in your budget, and you buy the best CPU you can when your old CPU can't run modern games. And AMD fits that quite nicely.

- Very few games "don't run" on an AMD. Heck, a last-gen AMD even. PUBG is notoriously under-optimized and my FX-8370 runs it just fine even though my "single-threaded" performance is complete crap compared to "the best of the best" Intel has to offer.

But a company would have to be insane or stupid, to design their games to only run on CPU's that cost >$400. The barrier-to-entry is too high.

- Furthermore, since I/we have to upgrade every couple years, I'd rather not buy a $600-800 CPU that's worth $25 in a few years. I'd rather pay $200 for a CPU that's worth $25 in a few years. You may think I'm exaggerating (and perhaps slightly) but I've literally had Xeon workstations and servers that were worth thousands and their CPU can be found... for $25 on eBay.

I think it's great that many people have much larger disposable incomes than I do. Geniunely, I'm happy for them. But spending >$600 on what will eventually be a glorified room heater / paper-weight seems very wasteful. I'm all about the best I can get, for a reasonable sum of money, and AMD (and Intel when they compete on similar models!) fits into that realm. These "enthusiest" grade CPUs are so expensive (and even worse the MOTHERBOARDS are >$300 for an i9 or Threadripper!) that they might as well be fictional. I'll never see one in real-life in the same way I'll never drive a Bughatti, so (in my opinion) they're not relevant in your usual collection of datapoints. You wouldn't compare a possible Toyota Camry to a Lambo and think "Well, the Lambo is so much faster, which is important for my calculations on a possible grocery getter car."

I currently play PUBG in 2560x1440 with my gens old, AMD FX-8370, and a GTX 1060. I could "almost" get 4K but it's only like 20-30 FPS. So if I've got eight-cores (4 of which I use to run a full Win10 VM with SQL server), using a one/two gen old CPU, and I can play the most modern games... what's the benefit? Higher FPS? Sure. But the problem is, the cost-to-benefit ratio (higher CPU $$ vs FPS) quickly goes to zero. You're not getting much more to be "ahead of the technology curve." As long as you're high enough in the curve to not be "unable to play modern games" you're set. If you spend bigger money you're not actually increasing your longevity of your workstation by much. The next gen will still make your "upper end" previous gen look like crap--especially when you consider the premium price you paid.

It would be much better to just be patient, and buy the current gen, when the next gen comes out. My current CPU dropped to HALF the price the second Ryzen came out, and is 2nd to the top in terms of performance-per-dollar:

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_value_available.html

My CPU has a mark of ~9000 and costs $100 and the highest i7 is 20,000. (~2x) and costs... $1,600. 16 times the price for 2 times the performance and we can still play the same games.

I'm considering (and saving for) a Ryzen build... except I'm waiting till Ryzen 1.5 (<-actual thing) and 2.0 come out. I don't need to upgrade my machine to "be cool." My machine is a tool, and as long as it does what I want, it's fine. It compiles fast, it easily runs >180 chrome tabs, and can run a VM and a video game at the same time. What's more to want? If it's video encoding, the SSD's I have are 10x more important than the CPU.