"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.
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.