Yeah.. intel is making me super sad. Im on 9900k and i was planning to get a 14th gen i9 or i7 when it gets cheap. The rusting thing seems like a non issue since it was a batch of bad chips. But the voltage thing is not cool. I tend to use a cpu for 5 years and i dont trust intel being honest with their "fix" via microcode. Maybe just delay the degradtion just enough until warranty is over.

Im waiting on intel arrowlake 15th gen or waiting to see if microcentee will have a 7950x bundle. The ryzen 9000 zeries cpu like 9950x is fucked because of core parking and much higher latencies between ccd. Gaming is secondary foe me these days, so amd x3d variant cpu is a second choice if 7950x bundle doest materialize, arrowlake sucks or overly expensive. I do 3d animations and the thing that uses cpu a lot is baking simulations like fluids and also compiling shaders and cpu inbetween frames when rendering.