I do not disagree with you, but tell me why they are out of hand?
Intel has dedicated massive, highly skilled teams to building upon its very high IPC/high frequency micro-architecture for about a decade since the launch of Conroe. Each new architecture has brought steady improvements in performance-per-clock while clocks have remained largely flat and performance/watt has moved up.
This is no small feat, no matter how much people want to belittle the "modest" perf/clock gains Intel delivers with each new generation.
Here we have AMD, which has substantially fewer resources than Intel and has suffered significant brain-drain over the last decade. They are doing a brand-new "from scratch" architecture, with far fewer engineers and, frankly, I doubt that the "best of the best" have stuck around as AMD has imploded (just look at LinkedIn and you will see what I'm talking about). They've moved to the likes of Apple, Qualcomm, and even Intel.
This new architecture is expected to bring significant performance-per-clock enhancements (+40% over XV if AMD is to be believed) and will be built on Samsung's mobile-centric 14LPP manufacturing process.
Does it really make sense that AMD will be able to match/BEAT Intel across the board as some are claiming in light of the conditions outlined? I think something will be "traded off" here. And I think the trade-off will be clock speed, assuming that the IPC gains are true.
For the server market (which is what Zen is targeting), this isn't a bad trade-off, the Xeon chips from Intel don't exactly come at super high clock speeds either. But for enthusiast desktops, this trade off may make the Zen HEDT chips less desirable than their Intel counterparts.