Pricing may not be as exciting as raw performance, but cost is really the bigger story here. In most cases you should be able to get about 5% higher performance for just a bit more than half the cost! This also affects the ever on-going "AMD vs Intel" debate. When we looked at the Premiere Pro performance of AMD's Ryzen CPUs back in March, the AMD CPUs were able to hold their own pretty well against the Intel CPUs. While the AMD Ryzen CPUs have seen performance gains since then (due to driver/BIOS and software improvements), the lower price of Intel's Skylake-X CPUs puts them firmly in the lead at the moment.
If you examine the individual results from each section, you will find that the Intel Core i7 7800X is a hair cheaper than the AMD Ryzen 7 1700X while being slightly faster for exporting/rendering previews and about 24% faster for warp stabilize. Averaged out, this makes the i7 7800X about 10% faster overall for $10 less. One step up from that, the Intel Core i7 7820X is a bit more expensive than the Ryzen 7 1800X, but in exchange it is a solid 17% faster at exporting, 15% faster at rendering previews, 32% faster at warp stabilize, and better at live playback. On average, this makes the i7 7820X about 18% faster than the AMD 7 1800X for $100 more. X299 motherboards do tend to be around $120 more than the lowest end AMD motherboard which will negate most of this pricing advantage, but keep in mind that the more affordable AMD motherboards are often lacking in features like WiFi or USB 3.1 and often use lower quality components to achieve the low price points. In addition, the AMD Ryzen CPUs only support 64GB of RAM and 24 PCI-E lanes while the Intel 6-10 cores support up to 128GB officially (or up to 512GB on X299 boards that support Registered RAM) and have either 28 or 44 PCI-E lanes.
The bottom line is that these new Intel CPUs are attractive more due to their pricing than their raw performance. They showed nice performance gains with RED and VR footage, but overall they are only about 5% faster than the previous generation Broadwell-E CPUs. This may change when the higher core count CPUs are launched later this year, but for now there is little reason to upgrade to Skylake-X if you have a Broadwell-E CPU. On the other hand, if you are already in the market for a new workstation the large drops in price means that you should be able to get much higher performance for your dollar than you could with the previous generation Intel CPUs.
