AMD went through half a decade of bad CPU sales because of 'the people' who bought Intel due to precisely its more versatile nature, higher single threaded performance and wide range of configurations to suit every form factor and market segment.
That was because of the Nehalem architecture which was first released back in 2008. It was a direct response to AMD's Athlon that had been kicking Intel's ass for years. When the Nehalem architecture was released it was when Intel came back and AMD slipped badly and it seemed to never be able to get their footing again until now with the Zen architecture.
The Zen architecture is a great architecture on paper, it really shows that it has the room to scale higher whereas Intel's Nehalem architecture from which all current generation processors can trace back their lineage is starting to show its age. We can see that in how lately Intel has only been feeding us 10% improvements (or even less) from generation to generation; the architecture is at the end of its life. If Intel has any hopes of doing any better than single-digit performance increases they'll have to go back to the drawing board and design an entirely new architecture from scratch but without any competition from the likes of AMD (up until now) there's been no reason to do so because they've enjoyed a virtual monopoly on processor performance.
Like I said before, the Zen architecture is a great architecture on paper; you can see that in what it's been able to do so far. Unfortunately it's a very young architecture being held back by current lithography processes. You can clearly see that the Zen architecture was made for high clocks from the very beginning, its performance increases quite well as you increase the clock speed. Unfortunately the current lithography process is what holds this architecture back, it can't clock high enough to really show what Zen can do. Hopefully with Zen 2 we'll finally see what the Zen architecture can really do since there's already data to show that GloFlo's 7nm process (along with help from IBM) results in much higher speeds; closer to 5 GHz which is what the Zen architecture so desperately needs. Once the Zen architecture hits 5 GHz is when we'll finally see what Zen can really do and I have a good feeling that that's when Zen will take off like a rocket leaving Intel in the dust.
AMD does not have the R&D intel can slam onto designing CPU's.
Yes, and it's a wonder what AMD has been able to do with the Zen architecture. It's a great architecture on paper with more than enough room to scale, I said this above but as I also said above that current process nodes holds this architecture back big time. This architecture loves high clocks!
