Actually over half of the US population is probably within an afternoon's drive of a Microcenter. You can reserve in stock product online before leaving home to pick up.
Make no mistake, those charts were a humiliation for AMD. The 2 year old now discontinued $300 9900k beat AMD new and best CPUs both with Nvidia cards as well as AMD's newest top GPUs despite AMD's smart memory access.
Putting my setup and the fact that a 9900k would slot right into my setup was a tweak to all the AMD fanboys that love that new AMD CPUs will work even though at a 1-4% performance hit with their old motherboards. Guess it hit a nerve.
You could be right re: the US pop. and MC. Doesn't help the 200,000,000 people in the other half of the population, or those outside the US. (Although one could pay an extra $20 over MC pricing at Newegg at time of post, though. Pretty good deal, and probably what I'd do if buying today).
Agree to disagree on what a humiliation is, I guess. Feel free to ignore the results from this review, and others, if the slight Intel win you highlighted makes you feel better.
A nerve was indeed struck, but not the one you think. It's the one that pings when someone cherry-picks which data they'll accept in order to bolster their existing conclusion. I'm by no means immune, but what do I know? I haven't bought an AMD processor since 2004 and am, for some reason, arguing with what appears to be a troll.