> But, how did they manage to catch up on Intel? Is there a catch? How did it go so wrong for Intel? I have no idea if this is true: this is just my theory. A

> But, how did they manage to catch up on Intel? Is there a catch? How did it go so wrong for Intel? I have no idea if this is true: this is just my theory. AMD struck it out of the park when they started using a chiplet architecture. It's really great for 1 socket and is pretty good for 2 sockets. The thing to understand about chiplets is: each chiplet is a separate CPU that has to perform cache coherency. The cache coherency traffic increases as the square of the number of CPUs, so you just can't have that many talk to each other at one time. Intel dominates the multi-socket server market and I think they wanted to maintain that dominance, so they just didn't want to go down the chiplet road, as it would really hurt their performance on 4+ socket systems. The result, though, is that in 1-2 socket systems, AMD has a big price/performance advantage over Intel, a big part of which is due to the way chip yields work.