The i9 is just a new brand name for the top-tier i7.
AMD have been compared favorably to nearly-top-tier i7s. Suddenly, by rebranding the top-tier to i9, Intel put a lot of gap between the i7 and Ryzen in the mind of the punter.
True, but I'm curious to see what the rest of the Threadripper line shakes up to be. The $599 chip only has 28 pcie lanes, which isn't enough to run two gpus at full speed. In comparison, the $300 ivy bridge-e cpu has 40 lanes. Especially with their Zeppelin line, AMD's got a chance to shake up Intel's stagnant IO situation.
Even modern GPUs don't give up a significant number of FPS in games when run in 8x or even 2.0 mode. That's been known for a while. But creating a workstation for high IO around this would be advised to go elsewhere.
So it did take AMD and Ryzen to make Intel push it's game from it's 5-6 year long hiatus with the i7 eh?
Competition is clearly good :)