They don't have to be better to benefit from purchasers wanting to diversify their plant across two rather than one CPU vendors.

This specific issue is very relevant to cloud providers, who are the guys that buy thousands of CPUs, and doesn't affect AMD's current generation. I don't know what Intel's profit breakdown is, but I suspect it is heavily weighted to the high-end server chips where they have had no real competition for many years.

Since that article came out, AMD built a whole new CPU architecture, with the help of the guy that designed the K8, too.