"Competitive" does not ever mean "uncontested". It means the trade-offs are reasonable. Choosing Intel after Zen was released meant making trade-offs -- giving up advantages, such as losing a large amount of multithreaded performance and paying a much higher price, as well as having to disperse more heat at maximum load for the chance at that lesser performance.

Just the same as choosing AMD would involve trade-offs in terms of a very slight loss of single threaded performance, or a higher idle power consumption, particularly in laptops.

In either case, you have good options. Neither product is completely devastatingly useless for any task, as was the case with Bulldozer, which had single threaded performance that was nearly half that of Intel's.

With the release of Zen, there was no longer a clear market leader dominating in performance of all classes, or pricing, or whatever other metric you want. That's called "competitive."

Zen 2 looks like it will be "uncontested." It will have the advantage in essentially everything, including single and multithreaded performance, gaming performance, power consumption, and price... if AMD's benchmarks are to be believed. The general sentiment is that AMD's benchmarks were actually conservative.

The benchmark leaked above in this thread is not running at the production boost clock, which would be 9% higher than the benchmark given, making it theoretically uncontested.

Obviously, we will have to wait for extensive third party benchmarking, but Zen has always been competitive, immediately and unequivocally reducing Intel to merely being competitive as well. Zen 2 has the opportunity be more.

I wouldn't be so sure:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20166237

Intel opened Thunderbolt up for non-Intel platforms awhile ago, and we're already seeing motherboards that offer it for Ryzen.

Zen+ has about the same IPC as the Intel processors from when it was released, the problem was just lower clockspeeds. The single threaded gap was somewhere around 5%, not the 40%+ of Bulldozer.

Zen 2 raises IPC by 15%, and raises clock speeds by a solid 10% or more. Single threaded Zen 2 performance is not even a slight concern for me.

Add 9% to the benchmark result this entire thread is about, because this engineering sample was not running at the specified boost frequency that the 3950X will have. Intel has nothing to compete against that... it should be uncontested.

On Epyc, their clock speeds were generally comparable to Intel's, and the single threaded performance was already great there, except for a few specialty processors that Intel released for servers that don't care about high core counts. Epyc 2 stands to completely annihilate any advantage Intel had left.

AMD Zen has always used less power than Intel for each unit of work done, which was one of the original surprises, so... power consumption is absolutely not favoring Intel.

I really feel like you're mentally comparing to the old Bulldozer Opteron processors, based on the concerns you listed.

AMD did have a huge amount of catching up to do after Bulldozer. One of the things that has been keeping Intel ahead is their fabrication has been going smoothly, generally ALWAYS ahead of what AMD had available to them. Here's the first article I hit (AMD loses on both idle and load): www.anandtech.com/show/11544/intel-skylake-ep-vs-amd-epyc-7000-cpu-battle-of-the-decade/22

Intel seems to be in a perfect storm, while AMD seems to have all their ducks lined up (architecture, Fabrication Process, clock speeds).

Still, exciting times! Intel has stagnated on quad-core enthusiast CPUs for a decade (Q6600 - 7700k), it's good to finally have some competition again.