[sangnoir]

> ...Intel was falling behind even AMD

The "even" makes the tone of your comment feel a tiny bit disrespectful towards AMD. By 2021, it was clear to me that AMD had their gloves off and were winning. Zen 3 was released in 2020 - the third generation of nearly flawless execution by AMD that Intel failed to respond to - outside of cutting the prices on some CPUs. For a while, Intel held onto the "fastest single-core speeds". Back in 2017, my first thought after being blown away by the performance of a first-gen Zen PC build was "I should buy shares in AMD" - AMD clearly had a superior product with an even better value proposition.

[mmaniac]

I think the point is that Intel had such a lead in the Bulldozer era that for AMD to overtake them was a tremendous failure.

I would not say that the first gen of Zen is was a clear winner over Skylake. It took a couple iterations before AMD clearly took the lead. AMD was simply so far behind that several large generational improvements were needed to do better than Intel.

[sangnoir]

> I would not say that the first gen of Zen is was a clear winner over Skylake.

In 2017, I would not have said that either for Zen 1 without qualification[1]. Zen 3 on the other hand, was a winner.

That said, 1st gen Zen had better bang-for-buck than Intel, for multicore workloads - in my case, I had built a workstation and thr equivalent intel build would have cost much more, expensive Ryzen motherboards notwithstanding.

1. In my comparison as I buyer, I didn't compare Intel and AMD processors by core count, but by what I'd get with my budget. The AMD build I eent with was better than an intel build for the same amount of money.

[throwaway48476]

Zen1 was 20% behind skylake but cheaper per core. Zen2 was 5% behind. Zen3 was faster.