The story isn't that cut and dry though, because it's not like the companies were anywhere near equal at the time. Remember that this was nearly a full decade after Intel decimated the CPU landscape with their anti-competative malpractices, which they were eventually fined BILLIONS for. AMDs meagre RnD budget was also spilt into the GPU division.
While I'm not saying AMD didn't mess up, Intel "got lucky" with Core 2, especially as it was "easy" for them to bring a quad core version to market quickly, where I think AMD had been aiming to (literally) 1-up the standard Duo chip, with its 3 core Phenom chip.
That miss step was the last, er, step... for AMD. With all their enterprise business stolen by Intel, and now end customers wary, they had to do "make or break"... on a budget. They unfortunately listened to super enthusiasts like me, moar cores, bigger is better... on a budget. Bulldozer is NOT an 8 core chip. Its shared resources problems means it acts like a 4 core with some double issue type stuff. Which i presume COULD have made a difference if developers had targeted it, but Intel was firmly market leader at that point in both customers and developers eyes, and they stalled after 2xxx line. 5-6 generations of 4 cores, with few new features.
Developers kept developing for 4 or less cores, definitely not using Bulldozers resources correctly, and as I understand it, most of the big boys like Unreal engine actually use an Intel developed compiler; AMD were never gonna beat that.
But AMD thankfully did have a last LAST step, and made a 4 core that acted like intel's. Only they could now easily add another, and another, and another...
So, sure, CPU enthusiasts who quickly grew annoyed with Intels tactics (that are still in use, disgustingly), were hopeful that if we shouted loudly enough about AMD during the dark years, that developers would take note and engineer something that would use all the resources given.
Did that work out? No. Developers still developed according to the "old ways", which is why the "8" core of a financially crippled company never stood a chance against the arrogance of their competitor.
Did we do enough? F*** yeah! We gave AMD just long enough (I'm pretty sure another few quarters would have seen AMD pretty much gone for good) to produce something spectacular.
Ryzen was a breath of fresh air in the stale tech days of 2017. Between 2000-2010, I upgraded my PC almost monthly, I had every AMD XP from 1200 to 2800. I had E and Q 6600s, and more Intel chips. But in 2017, I'd had a i950 since 2011. 2500 was nice, sure, but I think I'd have had to step down to dual channel 16GB Ram from my triple channel 24GB, and I'm a photoshop/ premiere guy. And then I realised Intel was conning us, and vowed they wouldn't get my money until absolutely necessary.
Thankfully, that didn't happen. I'd said if Ryzen was anywhere close (like 15-20%) to Intel's current offering, that I'd hit that bandwagon so hard... I'm pretty sure it ended up being about 10% slower in games (I was on a 2560x1600 monitor, so at full res it was actually even less) but CRUSHED it in productivity that could use more cores. I now have a 5950X on that same first motherboard I bought 6 years ago, with no massive difference in my benchmarks and reviews.
My OH, who always got my hand me downs, who's last PC had been a cheap 4460 (I think), now has a zen 4 7600X, and she'll get a zen 5, maybe even 6 without changing anything else.
And developers responded to Ryzen way faster than Bulldozer, because so did Intel. More cores came from both companies, and more software uses more cores - 6 is the very minimum now and... 8 is about ideal.
We weren't wrong. We were just a bit more optimistic and idealistic than reality allowed.
8 cores WOULD have been future proof, but one company COULDN'T give us a full 8 cores, and one company WOULDN'T give us a full 8 cores.
So feel free to make all the sarcastic threads you want, but you are cheering for a time when we were held back by capitalism rather than technology. Disgusting.