I think the point is that Intel had such a lead in the Bulldozer era that for AMD to overtake them was a tremendous failure.
I would not say that the first gen of Zen is was a clear winner over Skylake. It took a couple iterations before AMD clearly took the lead. AMD was simply so far behind that several large generational improvements were needed to do better than Intel.
> I would not say that the first gen of Zen is was a clear winner over Skylake.
In 2017, I would not have said that either for Zen 1 without qualification[1]. Zen 3 on the other hand, was a winner.
That said, 1st gen Zen had better bang-for-buck than Intel, for multicore workloads - in my case, I had built a workstation and thr equivalent intel build would have cost much more, expensive Ryzen motherboards notwithstanding.
1. In my comparison as I buyer, I didn't compare Intel and AMD processors by core count, but by what I'd get with my budget. The AMD build I eent with was better than an intel build for the same amount of money.
I would not say that the first gen of Zen is was a clear winner over Skylake. It took a couple iterations before AMD clearly took the lead. AMD was simply so far behind that several large generational improvements were needed to do better than Intel.