Caporegime
I don't disagree with you about the long-standing performance (and per-watt) of the aging Zen3 architecture, but I wasn't comparing that to begin with. But whilst we're on the point of process nodes, Intel have had a poor time with their process nodes for a while. AMD Zen3 is on TSMC 7 nm which Intel have only just managed to get competitive with (Intel 7), which in turn has offered them the similar perf-per-watt but with them pumping more juice to get ahead.
How do you know that ST performance of the 5800X3D is in fact lower than that of Alder Lake in gaming? I reckon it is actually faster, at least in the games that have responded well to the extra cache. I don't know of any specific testing that has been done to explore this.
Intel 7 is Intel's 10nm renamed, they claim its as good as TSMC 7nm.
It would be more correct to say that CB R23 ST performance is not the be all end all of gaming performance. This is very clearly shown with the 5800X3D which is about on par with a 5700X in CB R23 ST but is on par with a 12900K + DDR5 in games across a AAA biased suite and if you are into the sim or strategy stuff the 5800X3D is the fastest part on the planet for those kinds of games.
Anybody who is trying to extrapolate how Rocket Lake and Zen 4 will perform in games based on CB R23 ST numbers is going to be wide of the mark because the switch to DDR5 and doubling of L2 cache will help gaming performance but it does not impact CB r23 ST performance.
This guy gets it ^^^