Plus Intel has been such a dominate player for so long they've had no reason to innovate and largely haven't in some time. Their complacency caught up to them.
The anti-Intel circle jerk has to slow down a bit. Intel management is terrible but their engineers have been delivering amazing features. Did you know nowadays the main performance bottleneck is memory latency? For 8 years Intel has the best LLC around and with a very fancy adaptive replacement algorithm. Also the recent release of 10th gen came with 50% more L1 and 100% more L2, plus AVX-512 with finally a decent subset even on mobile i3 chips. And there are a lot of other important details most people miss.
The fact that Intel has an order of magnitude bigger R&D budget than AMD but still losing on many key metrics means that Intel is either doing a really bad job or AMD is full of geniuses. Nobody is saying that Intel does nothing, but they could have done so much more if they managed it better.
You have to take into account that Intel is having problems getting their next-gen architecture out the door.... who knows what it will bring good or bad... heck maybe even some of the delay is "oh crap Zen even beats our next-gen". Perahps Intels next-gen is just vaporware and they really have been sitting around raking in the $$$ b/c they could.
I'm really not trying to defend Intel (I understand that it may come across that way), just how we look at the situation. Indeed you could be spot on, just that the situation at Intel is likely multi-faceted.
ECC memory for desktops? PCI-E 4? more PCI-E lanes? There are lots of things Intel doesn't consider for their desktop CPU but AMD does. Security mitigations takes huge amount of CPU power.
Who cares about management vs engineers, we are customers and want fine reasonably priced products. Amd delivers on this front much more than Intel. Rest are details.
