And it was a hell of a time to be alive. AMD was first to 1GHz, and the Athlon/Operton opening up the x64 (amd64) architecture was awesome. I didn't go back to Intel until the Core2 duo, which was also an amazing cpu.

Zen was originally led by the same person as Opteron/K8/Hammer, Jim Keller... who now works for Intel.

I think the situation is a bit different this time around though as AMD’s bet on TSMC is paying off in a major way while Intel continue to flounder in the fab space.

> AMD’s bet on TSMC is paying off in a major way

Going back a bit further, AMD spinning off GlobalFoundries and then shopping around for fabs on the open market is definitely looking like a very good decision with hindsight. GF has also, since then, run into problems rolling out a next-gen node, and eventually cancelled their 7nm. Hard to say how much you can credit AMD for foresight there vs getting lucky, but being manufactured by TSMC vs. in-house has worked out well.

I don't think this was obvious at the time. Some people thought it was a good move (obviously including the decision makers), but a good number of pundits interpreted AMD giving up on a proprietary in-house fab and relying on commercially available facilities as basically AMD throwing in the towel on being able to compete head to head with Intel as an integrated chip designer/manufacturer, relegating them to more the budget space. To be fair, at the time (2009), TSMC processes were behind Intel's, so you would've had to predict TSMC catching up and surpassing Intel.

I don't think the foresight is in a particular manufacturer but in the fact that each successive fab generation was becoming more prohibitively expensive and more dominated by economies of scale.

I kind of want to see an analysis of the minimum viable volume of product to justify a new fab process going back over the years. Today it's just not feasible, compared to Noyce et al who could do it in their lab.

What's fun about this is now Intel's world is on fire from a single source. The only way AMD could have guess that the TSMC process would improve so much is if they guessed that Apple would get into their own chip design (which only became clear in 2011-2012 and showed results in ~2014-2015) and would bankroll TSMC's 10 and 7.

Opteron also (eventually) killed off all the 64 bit RISC players. Quite a juggernaut.

I am not seeing any similarities to Opteron era, from Intel's current position, AMD's Roadmap and execution, to TSMC's Roadmap.

No, it’s not. AMD didn’t have double of the performance for half of the price at the time. This is a much bigger advantage.