I don't get this CPU at all. Don't most professionals who need core horsepower use dual Xeon systems? I don't see where this fits, except as a shot across AMDs bow aimed at Threadripper. Maybe I'm completely wrong, as I have no knowledge of professional workstations.
It's a processor that is marketted towards enthusiasts but content creators and professional users are definitely going to be interested aswell for a few reasons.
1. This has a much higher clock speed than most multi-CPU capable XEON's for the price.
2. It's cheaper overall than buying two 8 Core CPU's + Workstation Board + ECC Memory (Plus you get 2 extra cores over going dual 8 core)
3. The memory supported is much faster (2666MHz is the fastest ECC you can get right now vs 4133MHz for DDR4 non-ECC and you can run this CPU with around 3.6GHz DDR4 no problemo).
So if you're not doing absolutely critical work that requires ECC this is a better buy. People doing music, video, programming etc will likely prefer to buy this than dual processors.
However all of those things would run just fine on the much more affordable 1950X and that does support ECC memory. I think personally the 1950X is a much better buy if you're a professional that can make use of this many threads.
But I do think the 7980XE will take a few dual processor sales from Intel. I don't think it will affect the 1950X sales much.
Bottom line though, this is a halo product that doesn't need to make much sense beyond being the fastest single processor you can buy. That will drive sales of the more "common sense" processors as consumers look who's fastest and then go down the product stack to purchase something from that brand within their budget.
