[Dylan16807]

Becoming mediocre by Intel's standard was a huge step at the time. So both of you can be right.

[ahartmetz]

Almost on par with Intel in single core but twice the amount of cores. A big deal if you had a use for all these cores - I did, compiling C++ code.

[Sparkyte]

Both of you forget that for the longest time Intel consumer chips excluded virtualization and other features until Ryzen 1st generation had it available. Like AVX-512 for example. 1st generation was a huge win in functionality for consumers even if it didn't hit the same performance of Intel. AVX-512 wasn't support on first gen, but there were other features I forget now but it was also a reason I had stuck to AMD.