In 2016, AMD was near bankruptcy, after many years of mediocre tech and bad decisions. At that time it looked like they were never going to compete with Intel a

In 2016, AMD was near bankruptcy, after many years of mediocre tech and bad decisions. At that time it looked like they were never going to compete with Intel again in any meaningful way, didn't have the resources to pull ahead, had a negative balance sheet, and the best hope was that they could survive on some cheaper x86 niches, on the grace of people wanting some x86 competition to exist.