If china invades taiwan,

The timeline would be aggressively accelerated in this scenario. The timeline for transition assumes we continue to do it at the typical leisurely business pace. But if the entire world suddenly needs a new long term source of semiconductors and various components, that’s an insane amount of economic pressure. That’s very a different case from a normal supply disruption.

But I might not have if I had a Z motherboard and could overclock.

For single threaded performance, it’s not really worth the upgrade. But for multithreaded applications it’s definitely a worthy upgrade compared to just overclocking.

Before the 7800X3D came around, that was the gaming CPU to recommend.

I was not impressed by the 7800X3D when it released because of the price. I’m sure a lot of people paired a 7800X3D with a midrange GPU, when in reality they would have been better off getting a cheaper CPU and a better graphics card.

If they are the same price go for the i7.

Would this have the same effect as disabling E cores?

Disabling E cores would likely only ever hurt performance or have no effect. That’s because this apparently works by automatically adjusting thread affinities to boost performance. Essentially Intel profiles a game, determine the optimal thread affinities for maximum performance, and releases a profile.

The reason this is needed is because in a game you have a lot of threads working in concert with each other to achieve the goal of rendering a frame to the screen and a generic thread optimizer doesn’t know that the thread it just put on the e-core is what the main thread is waiting for to pass instructions to the GPU.

For some games, this sort of thread affinity strategy will not boost performance.

AMD could probably do something like this for the 7950X3D and we’d likely see the discrepancy between it and the 7800X3D disappear.