OK, got you thinking - did not figure in the OC overhead that Intel does have while AMD does not have much.There are no mysteries with Cascade Lake-X and IPC. It's Skylake outside of AVX512 workloads. The relatively low clock speeds Intel went with to keep the TDP down hurts the CPU in its stock form. Overclocked, its a different animal. It's a challenge to keep cool though. I won't kid you there. It puls tons of power and heats up the room. Unfortunately, I do not have a 3950X to test with. However, given the massive gains achieved when overclocking the 10980XE, it may very well compete when OC'ed. At stock speeds, they'll probably trade blows in some applications.