Throughout 2019, we’ve had quite the reverse of performance when it comes to the competitiveness of the modern performance-oriented desktop processor. This year we’ve seen AMD introduce its Zen 2 processor designs, offering up to 16 cores for mainstream use cases, and matching if not beating Intel in raw clock-for-clock performance. In a similar vein, AMD’s Rome CPUs offer up to 64 cores per socket on the server side, where Intel can only offer 28 (or 56 in some configurations), while at the same time both consumer and server pushing PCIe 4.0 in preparation for upcoming GPUs and add-in accelerators. Intel has also launched a number of products, such as a couple of 5.0 GHz all-core CPUs, an unlocked 28-core CPU, Xeon 9200, and the next generation of server products.