Intel is behind in fab technology. I don't think the problem is that Intel's chip designs are what's holding them back. AMD offered better multi core performance and Intel responded with more cores as well. However, I do believe that Intel suffers from an awful corporate environment. There was a story about ISPC [0] with one chapter [1] talking about the culture at the company.

[0] https://pharr.org/matt/blog/2018/04/30/ispc-all.html

[1] https://pharr.org/matt/blog/2018/04/28/ispc-talks-and-depart...

> their systems are better tested than the competition

Yes, Spectrum and Meltdown definitely proves that...

I think I heard that argument already, in the 90's. But instead of Intel it was Sun, it was SGI, it was Digital, etc

The truth is that money wins and while there is an inertia, it's more like a Cartoon inertia where your guy won't fall from the cliff until he looks down. But then it's too late.

If by tested you mean, getting eaten alive by vulnerability reports monthly and furthering degrading performance, sure. There isn't much rocket science otherwise to "better tested" in a server platform. Either it passes benchmarks of use case scenarios or it doesn't.

Yes there is. Server platforms are connected to more storage, higher bandwidth networking and more exotic sockets (more than one CPU). It is one thing to support lots of PCI express lots on paper. It is another thing to have a working solution that doens't suffer degraded performance when all the PCI express slots are in use at the same time.

None of this is rocket science but it takes money and engineers time to make these things happen. Intel has more of both at the moment.