[dralley]

>Intel is still faster in most applications, simply by virtue of having a clock speed advantage that by far exceeds any IPC difference

This is already only marginally true, the difference is only about 5% depending on the application, and in some applications AMD comes out ahead anyway. Expect the remaining difference to disappear when Zen 3 releases in a few months.

>Another significant weakness of AMD's current platform is idle power consumption.

AMD seems to have caught up here almost entirely. They've done a lot of work to improve idle power consumption lately and the node advantage probably helps, too.