OP is implying the i5 was Pareto-optimal in terms of price and performance.

Exactly. In 2020 the 10400f was about 40% more expensive; now Intel is forced to lower the price of their entire lineup to compete against AMD. These days, at most performance tiers, Intel+mobo combo are slightly cheaper than AMD's equivalent.

Of course, Intel's CPUs have less PCIE lanes, no ECC support, lessor upgrade path, generates more heat, etc.

Finally my old desktop was Intel and I am working on a lot of kernel/VM stuff. I don't want to switch architecture halfway. I did that before and it was painful.

> These days, at most performance tiers, Intel+mobo combo are slightly cheaper than AMD's equivalent.

> Of course, Intel's CPUs have [...] lessor upgrade path

One big + for AMD is their socket system, and keeping it the same for multiple generations via a roadmap so people can plan. Contrast that with intel, who comes up with a new socket every generation forcing you to buy a new motherboard and likely new ram if you want to upgrade. AMD's Socket AM4 was released in 2016 and works with Zen+, Zen 2, Zen 3 and Excavator microarchitectures. If you upgraded every 2 years, that's 3 motherboards and memory sets you would have had to purchase if you went with Intel vs a single motherboard/memory and upgrading only the cpu with AMD. That's quite a premium.

Just a small correction, most of the AM4 motherboards released in 2016 and 2017 do _not_ run Zen 3. Only few vendors (I think ASRock is the only one?) added support for Zen 3 on B350 / X370 / A320. The rest only added support on B450 (2018) / X470 (2018) / B550 / X570 / A520. If you were one of the original Zen buyers in 2017, you are unfortunately limited to Zen 2 CPUs, unless if you had an ASRock motherboard.

Generally true but Ryzen 5000 series is expected to last gen runs on AM4 platform due to DDR5 is coming.

> Finally my old desktop was Intel and I am working on a lot of kernel/VM stuff. I don't want to switch architecture halfway. I did that before and it was painful.

What? Aside from edge-cases resulting from slightly divergent microcode implementations you should not be dealing with that. They are both x86-64. (Forgive me if I am missing an elephant in the room.)

my memory is that the some of the Intel and AMD architecture extensions (including the various virtualization extensions) are incompatible.

just a guess, but if he went to the store looking for an LGA1200 socket motherboard, he wasn't planning on purchasing a new CPU as well

In his last paragraph, he said he bought a new processor. Or at least, he suggested a purchase by referring to its discount using present tense.

Assuming that you're thinking they'd be looking at a R5 3600 ($179.99). For gaming the 10400F ($109.99) is basically on par with the AMD. AMD is only worth it for productivity related task, and only then it's a ~15% performance hit.

> Why didn’t you just go with AMD?

It's out of stock everywhere..

I think Ryzen 5000 series' stock situation is getting better, both 5600X and 5800X has been consistently in stock in Belgium and Netherlands for about 2-3 weeks.