Not so sure about the octacore just yet. For now, only the i3 and i5 have been officially announced, with most of them only being a 100Mhz base clock speedbump (i5 9500 doesn't even have that) and 100-200mhz turboclock boost.

This year is mainly a speedbump it seems, both at AMD and Intel. At least the speedbumps in the Ryzen 2000 line were a bit more substantial and the improved turbo now keeps the boost speed much better than before.

Most of AMD's gains seem to have come from improved latency in Zen+.
Zen2 should be interesting, that's for sure.

That, and the much improved Precision boost 2

I expect Zen 2 to beat Intel's offerings in IPC (though only slightly and not in every scenario), but not in clock speed, reversing the situation during Bulldozer and bringing back memories of the good old Athlon vs Pentium 4

While it hasn't been confirmed yet, I'm sure Intel will launch an 8 core part. Those big, and dominant, companies like Intel and Nvidia always feel the need to outdo the competition to assert their dominant position. That's why Nvidia launched the 1070Ti when Vega 56 appeared and it's the reason why Intel will launch and 8-core part in the mainstream market.

They simply can't allow AMD (or any other competitor) the chance to brag about having the best "insert product here", and that's what AMD is doing with their 8-core Ryzen parts when multi-threading is involved.

The problem is however that Intel would need new masks for an 8-core chip unless rebranding and capping one of their LLC HEDT chips, which NVidia didn't need when bringing the 1070Ti (which is mostly an underclocked 1080). Creating those takes time, too much time to come out with those in just a couple weeks. If Intel didn't start working on those masks before Ryzen got released, they won't be able to bring an octacore just yet

^Well, we'll see soon enough.

Damn I have an absolute blast playing The Division. I think buying it cheap after all update and seeing the full package instead of buying early and coming back to the game after each update makes it a better, straightforward experience.

I love the seamless drop in drop out experience, I kinda had to join multiplayer session for hard mission, then once I had good loot out of those, I could do the smaller one easily rince and repeat. The game is a tad repeatitive, but shooting baddies in the face never gets old. Positioning, flanking, trapping is all very important to succeed,

Had I a group of friend to play this it would have been so sweet !

That has always been AMD's M.O. Offer more cores for your dollar.
Heck, AMD had the first Quad-Core CPU under $100.

Ryzen mixes things up because of it's strong single threaded performance.

Well, AMD gave us more cores, but Intel was still faster in many multi-threaded applications due to its massive IPC advantage. But now that they no longer have it, the extra cores AMD gives us do make a difference, which is why Intel has been forced to gives up 6 cores on their mainstream products, and soon, 8.

Well. Depends on the benchmarks back then. The Athlon 2 x4 was able to give Intels equivalent priced dual-cores a run for their money in heavily threaded applications.