my take on this
laptop- Intel doesn't have any problems there, renoir is coming but so is tiger lake
desktop- lets face it, since i7 6700k the average joe doesn't feel a difference and corporate even more so
power is problem only for heavy workloads and the typical use for the total system power case+monitor you dont know the difference between new ryzens and new cores
intel system have an advantage in iGPU and lower idle power
my 3900x is an overkill for me, 3950x even more- its a halo product which is important for the image of AMD but it doesn't force the sales much
not to say, I am pretty much pissed with total system power of my 3900X at default
hedt- intel has nothing to offer here, but hedt is more of halo product than real money maker
workstation- xeon is not as good as TR, but not that bad
up to 32C server- intel is competitive performance, price/power not but it doesn't seem to be enough
64C- the big fat kill by AMD- but the reviews of high core count deceive by its price/perf caclulations- they completely miss license costs, transition costs, service costs etc..
as for the 2003 times...
the p4 on desktop was ok for general and more workstyle usage, gaming was awful (min fps)
but the desktop p4 had 200MHz quad pumped fsb (effectively 800MHz) and it was even then bandwitch starved in critical situations
but the xeon- not only it had 2,8GHz freq compared to 2,8GHz of opteron, but had 100MHz quad pumped bus shared between 4!!yes 4 of CPUs, so 400 MHz/4=100MHz for 1 xeon
combined with pathetic x87 FPU and high memory latencies it was a hand calculator compared to the opteron
now its definitely not the case except very halo and niche high core counts, which benefit really VMs and render farms
everyone else calculates the linense costs with benefits
but imo 2020 is the year of change- AMD delivers MIlan/zen3 and if Intel postpones icelake server then (very unexpected/sarcasm off) the game will change
or maybe the big gamers have already some intel prototypes that are worth the wait...
the biggest problem of Intel isn't performance now, but the shortages