Honestly I think the CES Keynote will have information on Zen 2 for mainstream Ryzen 3xxx as Zen2 is already in the wild with EPYC. There's no reason not to hammer home the advantage and announce info slightly early and still have the usual March release of the mainstream CPU product line. Hopefully they'll have the X570's ready for release too and looking forward to Navi info as well. I don't expect it to be a physical launch, really have no idea where that line of thought came from, it's likely wrong but hey BS gets clicks these days.
easyrider you may have walked the walk but I don't agree with your perspective on this. Yes the 9900K does win out for sheer performance with 8c. Though one could argue that 8/16 for gaming doesn't really beat 6/12 currently. Therefore an older 8700K or 8086K would be better bargains, easier to delid and use LM on and then slap a water block on and get some mad 5.3GHz performance out of them instead of dealing with the rather pathetic soldering attempt on the 9900K and then it's VRM munching power draws. Hell a 9900K draws similar power to my 1950X FFS. Fast it is, that's undeniable, efficient, well no it's not efficient. Also to say TR4 is poo at gaming, that's a bit of nonsense too. In some scenario's it's sub-optimal just like in some scenario's the 9900K is sub-optimal. Anything running at 1440p or higher is mostly GPU limited anyway, there are a small minority of games that require high single core IPC/Frequency and they are best on an Intel currently. If the 3xxx releases with specs close to those leaked, Intel's IPC/Frequency lead disappears and suddenly there's no reason to get them over the AMD's at all. Features are worse, speed worse, multi-core perf worse etc. The final part of the puzzle will be to get dev's to optimise for AMD too and remove the final Intel optimisation hurdle from the list.
