Some 15 years ago, AMD made the fastest gaming processor, the FX57.
It was a single core monster, running at a clock of 2.8. It had a passmark rating of 517.
It beat the intel processors available at the time.
At the time games and apps were coded in a single threaded manner.
Such coding is much simpler.
And many apps were hard to break down into separate tasks.
Then, dual and quad cores became prevalent and Intel came back.
It has been a back and forth competition since then.
AMD made chips with more cores, but the cores were not as fast as intel's.
Currently, amd performance per clock is comparable to intel.
amd ryzen offered more cores/threads than intel for a comparable price.
That is very effective for users who can run many instances of an app, or who run games that can take advantage of many threads. Multiplayer games for one example.
Ryzen offers overclocking across the product line.
But, ryzen does not overclock well since the processors are binned.
Today, intel offers higher maximum clocks which is beneficial to most games.
The reality is that once you spend about $250 on a modern processor, you will game very well.
You can buy a i5-10600K or ryzen 3600x in that price range.
Intel is currently getting a price premium from early adopters.
They have 12 threads which is more than enough for the general gamer.
Most games can not make effective use of more than 4-6 threads.
You can see the importance of single thread performance on multithreaded apps
By looking at Amdahl's theorem:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl's_law#/media/File:AmdahlsLaw.svg
The passmark ratings of these processors is in the range of 13000 and single thread 2600.
Quite a change from the $1000 FX57@517.
FWIW, for the gamer, here is a review of the i5-10600K:
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-core-i5-10600k-cpu-review
Intel has been hurt by the success of ryzen.
They are not about to lose that market.
In the works is a new architecture that will improve the performance per clock.
It will show up in mobile processors imminently.
Desktop processors may be next year,
What to do now??
If you, the OP has a need now, go ahead and buy now.
If you wait for the next thing, you will wait forever.
If you will be gaming, pay attention to the graphics card.
Budget about 2x the cost of the processor for the graphics card for balanced gaming.
Nvidia is supposed to launch a new generation of 3000 series cards imminently.
Likely, these will start at the high end, exceeding anything we have seen today.
Expect the best cards to be VERY expensive, and will command an early adopter price premium.
Availability will be an issue.
If you are going to buy a graphics card now, look at an EVGA card. They have a free 90 day upgrade option if you should
want to trade it in for something stronger.