I think you'd be surprised by how many identical style limitations others Nvidia has done over the years, from slightly lower clocked memory all the way down to

I think you'd be surprised by how many identical style limitations others Nvidia has done over the years, from slightly lower clocked memory all the way down to programs that run slower than they should on other vendors because Nvidia code used by games was intentionally deoptimized for other platforms. AMD too, though to a lesser extent since it's been a while since it had its time in the sun from a market penetration perspective. 10% memory bandwidth is actually extremely negligible, particularly for the lower core count SKUs in the tier. The desktop gear you mentioned this all for has 1/3 the memory bandwidth, 1/4 if you plan on putting lots of RAM in, and can get away with a great deal many more tasks than you're describing something with 10% less memory bandwidth as able to do. We're talking a maximum worst case difference, for going between the lowest end Xeon to highest end Xeon, of 10% for the "my workload is to benchmark memory bandwidth only" use case. The reasoning for why it's supposed to be bad seems more focused with the starting assumption anything Intel does must somehow be bad than actually explaining what actual workload impact is had vs other options, and that's the red flag for me here.