AMD didn't have the technical prowess to do it, that's why. And even if they had, the Wintel duopoly was so entrenched that even if their offerings were "nearly as good as" Intel's, they still wouldn't have been able to make headway because Intel was threatening OEMs like HP, Dell, etc.

If Jim Keller hadn't gone back to help AMD, and if Dr. Lisa Su hadn't decided to take on that challenge, we'd likely be stuck in an era of processor Dark Ages, OR, Apple and their Apple Silicon line of processors would be even more attractive than they already are.

Go back and benchmark your old Intel CPUs with security mitigations enabled. You'll lose 30-60% performance in syscall heavy and other common workloads while Bulldozers barely change.

Intel gained an unfair advantage and built their reputation by taking shortcuts with security. The FX series weren't marvels of design engineering, but they weren't nearly as behind the performance curve as customers were deceived into thinking.

Actually, I am mad at them for creating that Bulldozer mess. Nevertheless, it is good to have some competition back in the game.

This probably has a lot to do with the anti-consumer segmentation and processor locking that Intel implemented at the dawn of the decade- arbitrary socket changes every 2 years so you couldn't upgrade without buying a new motherboard, and locking overclocking behind a paywall being the two most egregious.

AMD's processors, while not fast, did none of those things and were cheap. I guess that buys you a lot of good will when Intel's still charging 300 dollars for CPUs that wouldn't beat a 2500K at 4.6GHz until several years down the line.