shabbo :
One of the dumbest review I've read. Only thing Intel is good at is providing a few percent better gaming performance on a chip that's not even meant for gaming.
1) Motherboard choices?? Who cares about that and why should it carry equal weight to other more important categories in this match up? There's more then enough motherboard choices for Threadripper and these motherboards are probably better built and will support future processors. Useless category and the winner should be AMD here
2) Gaming performance. Who the heck cares about the little advantage one may have over the other. Instead it should be game development performance. You just created this category to award Intel a point.
3) Productivity. How is this even a tie? I can run over half a dozen more VMs at higher performance on AMD. I can have more 10GE NICs and better I/O and be way more productive on AMD.
1. The platform is very important. What features it has and supports is very important. And are you saying that an Asus ROG X299 board is lower quality than an Asus ROG x399 board? That Asus would for some reason purposefully, or other vendors, make them lower quality? They aren't. Aside from the chipset they build them very similarly.
2. It doesn't matter but some special kid will buy a TR2 or SL-X system with all those cores and a custom water loop and throw in 2 Titan Vs in SLI for the bragging rights.
3. This one is a mix. Productivity is whatever but the NICs belongs in the platform.
Speaking of the platform, unless someone gets one of the oddball 7700 series CPUs for the X299 platform they will have a total of 68 PCIe 3.0 lanes. The difference is in how AMD and Intel do it. AMD has 64 total Gen 3 on the CPU with 4 of them being sent to the PCH and I assume split between all the devices on the PCH. Intel has 44 Gen 3 on anything from the 7820X and up with an additional 24 on the PCH which is used for other devices.
The other side is the support. People talk about having 4 full x16 lanes, well no. You can have 2 x16 and 2 x8 for GPUs per AMDs specs. However as you have said this is not a gaming system so SLI/CFX is pointless. Even on a normal gaming system beyond 2 GPUs is pointless as the gains for the costs do not add up. Add 33% more power, 33% more cost and get little to no real benefits.
Other than possibly supporting the next CPU AMD launches on the platform I see no advantage for AMDs platform. As for 10Gbe nics both have them available but outside of corporate networks are useless as most consumers do not have 10Gbe routers yet and probably wont since consumer routers are moving to 5Gbe setups.