> ...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.