Ultimately, the number of cores doesn't mean anything by itself, it's the aggregate performance that matters. We'd all happily take a 16 Ghz single core CPU ove

Ultimately, the number of cores doesn't mean anything by itself, it's the aggregate performance that matters. We'd all happily take a 16 Ghz single core CPU over a 4 Ghz quad core any day, if such a thing was possible. It's true that I'm in a very niche spot in that most of my workloads are vectorization-heavy, but I don't think it's quite as niche as people think. If you look at the benchmarks, quite a few workloads (check out x265 performance on ffmpeg, or audio encoding, or compression...) are sufficiently vectorized for the 7700k to be more cost efficient than the 1800X. Realizing that does feel a bit sad, though, I agree. For pure gaming, I'd still get the fastest Kaby Lake i5 and be done with it. It doesn't matter what happens with DX12, etc., games are still going to be GPU bound for the foreseeable future and the cheap i5 won't significantly bottleneck you for many years to come.