The poll is a 3 horse race and they all win IMO. Each is the champ of their era. I personally disregard the pedantic and semantic contentions concerning GOAT status. Sucks the fun right out it.
I do think it is an oversight to leave out some of the magnificent Intel HEDT CPUs for X59,79,99. While they were not as proliferate, they were nevertheless marketed and sold to the general public. My son had a friend with a Cyberpower PC with i7 4930K back in his jr. H.S. days. An absolute monster for 2013. Further propped up by the excellent X79 platform.
I have made the case for Zen 3 before; and it wins my vote easily for a number of reasons.
1. It's 4yrs old in November. Yet, still the best selling retail lineup today. That's never happened. The 5600X is the best selling retail CPU of all time, and currently number 1 on Amazon U.S. because supply and demand has made the 7800X3D stupid expensive.
2. Platform/AM4 longevity. There are so many with similar experiences to the one
@IEC shared. Dropping a 5X3D or 5950X into a board that was running a 2017 1700X is something I think too few fully appreciate the impressiveness of. We take things for granted, but this one is jaw dropping for me. As like many of you, I come from the era when the running joke was that by the time you got your new PC home, there was a faster one on the shelf already.
3. Bang for buck. Like it or not, gaming drives the DIY/retail market. The 5800X3D can still beat the fastest CPUs the competition has in a fair number of games, and do it for significantly less money. On a 4yr old board. If LGA1700 is paired with DDR4 it can do it on a 6-7yr old board. That's crazy sauce from my POV.
4. Zen 3 3D meant no need for overclocking, expensive boards, or the fastest ram, to get top level gaming anymore. And without stupid high wattage or accelerated degradation. It's like raptor has progeria.
5. It's the generation that decisively won vs Intel. It had been a looooong time since AMD took a round on all of the scorecards. Zen 3 has won every round since in the retail market. It even beats its stablemates outside of the current champ. Not a single one of us predicted in late 2020 that Zen 3 would be best selling 4yrs later. Of course we didn't, it was an outlandish claim; but here we are.