Is it so much to ask that people wait for actual, repeatable benchmarks before they spout off? Or, for that matter, to know the history of the brands in question here?
The history of the brands in question here is not favorable to AMD. With K7 AMD was competitive, though Intel was able to extract enough frequency from the second iteration of the P4 (Northwood) to make them viable choices in the marketplace. With K8, AMD opened up a lead on Intel thanks to some core improvements as well as an integrated memory controller.
With Conroe, Intel took a decisive leadership position, though it still hadn't integrated the memory controller -- which required Intel to bolt on boat-loads of L2$ to hide the inherent memory latency of the FSB.
People then expected AMD's upcoming Barcelona CPU (the "Zen" of its day) to come in and clean up, putting AMD back in a leadership position. AMD execs were telling people that Barcelona would outperform AMD's "Clovertown" by 40%, which helped to build hype for AMD's upcoming processors (at the time, Intel was regaining significant share in PCs and servers, which hurt AMD financially -- they had to significantly lower CPU prices to stay in the game).
Barcelona was disappointing, due to low clocks and a ST perf/MHz deficiency relative to Conroe/Kentsfield. AMD tried to market its parts as "true quad cores" (Intel was using an MCM), but the performance numbers spoke for themselves.
AMD did a Barcelona v2 in the form of the Phenom II line. These cleaned up the original Phenom's cache architecture and could clock significantly better. They could not match the Nehalem parts in performance, and Intel's product stack was aggressive enough to keep AMD at bay, but I do remember buying a LOT of Athlon II X3/X4 chips back in the day for builds I did for people because AMD was able to price aggressively enough to stay relevant.
Then we got Bulldozer, what a piece of work that was. It was very hyped up, viewed as the "second coming" by many forum goers across the web. Basically, the "common wisdom" was that AMD would be able to offer up many more cores than Intel and still offer competitive ST performance, which would allow AMD to deliver a K.O. punch in PCs and servers (especially servers actually -- Anand himself said that he thought Bulldozer would do well in the server market).
The reality was that Bulldozer -- in an AMD's execs own words -- was an "unmitigated disaster." A quad core Sandy Bridge (I remember people were told to "wait for Bulldozer" rather than buy SNB, and I believe I actually waited to see what AMD had coming up back in the day) wrecked the FX-8150 in most consumer workloads, and even in heavily threaded workloads that 2600K could pack a punch.
At the end of the day, most enthusiasts seem to have gone with the 2500K/2600K. I loved my 2600K.
AMD only iterated on Bulldozer in the server/enthusiast desktop space once with Piledriver, and since then pretty much left the enthusiast/server market probably because they needed to divert much of their limited R&D resources (which began to fall rapidly as revenue dried up) to Zen. AMD continued to build laptop SoCs with the newer Construction cores though because they couldn't let their PC revenue go to zero and consumers seem to be more forgiving of BD & derivatives shortcomings (data center customers have to worry about the TCO of a given solution, so they can't buy inefficient products because they want to support AMD; consumers who buy laptops at Best Buy could very well buy an AMD powered device and be happy with it, even if the Intel alternative performs better).
In that time, Intel put out Ivy Bridge (+5% IPC over SNB), Haswell (+10% IPC over IVB), Broadwell (+3-5% IPC over HSW), and Skylake (+12% or so over BDW). Aside from the Broadwell issue, Intel managed to keep maximum OC potential roughly constant to around 4.7-4.8GHz even though IPC went up. Intel also integrated more stuff into these chips, dramatically improved iGPU, etc. Kaby Lake in early 2017 won't move IPC forward but it will probably allow for 5GHz-ish overclocks, so performance moves up.
As a consumer, I view one company as having delivered new, worthwhile products for me to buy approximately every year or so. The other abandoned the enthusiast desktop market for a while, but says it's going to be back. We'll see how good Zen ultimately is, but if you look at the 10 year track records of both companies (and the financial reality that Intel has dramatically increased its R&D spending over the last decade while AMD hasn't, and AMD spends about 1/12th of what Intel does), it is not favorable to AMD.