Of course, but obviously I didn’t mean to mean “exact same” in the absolute literal sense of the word!
Well, then maybe say what you
actually mean. If you meant "essentially the same", then don't say "the exact same".
The processors are still identical by 99.999% in terms of design and core functionality and that counts as being same in my book.
No, I wouldn't say five 9's. The mitigations can't have been metal-level fixes, so probably not more than three 9's. You might try to downplay this, as well, but 2 orders of magnitude
is kind of a big deal. The point is, if they changed it at the RTL level, then there could well be other changes in there that might address various power efficiency or scaling issues.
As for the genuine process shifts or iterations, yes it does involve a redesign of the cpu with new libraries, which is a serious undertaking, but a redesign of largely the same thing nonetheless and, sans the frequency or efficiency bump, practically the same product to the end user.
Eh, if you're willing to go that far, then it's not really a stretch to say that Broadwell vs. Skylake are "practically the same product to the end user".
I hope that with Comet lake, Intel tweaks and improves things a little and reduces the maximum core to core latency.
Maybe they'll even drop the ring bus, in favor of something else. Anyway, I don't
need 10 cores, and I don't really see why Intel is intent on having that battle with AMD.
As for RAM becoming a bottleneck, I think it will be alright as long as frequency is high enough - a 3466MHzC16 kit and up should be fine.
When Intel first introduced quad-channel memory, their Sandybridge E CPUs maxed out at 8 cores. Sure, memory has gotten faster, but so have the cores. And there's also an iGPU that wants its share of the bandwidth - which Sandybridge E didn't have. Or, if not that, then (pretty soon) a PCIe 4.0-connected dGPU.
Consider this:
https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/compare.html?productIds=186605,64582
To feed the 8-core Xeon E5-2687W (3.1 GHz base; 3.8 GHz turbo), Intel provided 51.2 GB/s of memory bandwidth.
To feed the 8-core i9-9900K (iGPU + 3.6 GHz base, 5.0 GHz turbo), Intel provided 41.6 GB/s of memory bandwidth.
Granted, the E5-2687W has more PCIe lanes to feed that collectively add up to even more than the i9's GPU could probably consume. However, if you compare base GB/s per core GHz, the Sandybridge Xeon gets 2.06 bytes per core clock vs. the Coffee Lake-R i9's 1.44 bytes per core clock. So, just looking at the cores, the i9 is already at a significant deficit.
The extent to which this matters will depend entirely on workload. For computing digits of Pi, it won't matter a bit. Yet, hosting a large, in-memory database was probably already memory-bound with even fewer cores.