Actually the opterons were pretty competitive for many years, but of course stalled with the opteron 63xx series. They still scaled better than intel, but ofte

Actually the opterons were pretty competitive for many years, but of course stalled with the opteron 63xx series. They still scaled better than intel, but often lost on single thread performance. But if you were looking at performance per node on parallel tasks they often won by a substantial amount on price/performance. However since 2012 (the opteron 63xx announce) AMD dropped the ball. First they were non-competitive on the dual sockets, and then a year or so later they were non-competitive on quad sockets. Not sure why it's taken them 5 years to bring out something newer, but surprisingly the ryzen/naples/epyc looks surprisingly competitive.