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early zen werent performant in lower core count loads, but were extremely competitive in multi core workloads, especially when performamce per dollar was added into the equation. even if one revisits heavy multi core workload benchmarks, they faired fairly well in it. its just at a consumer level, they werent up to snuff yet because in gaming, they were still stuck with developers optimizing for an 8 thread console, and for laptops amds presence was near non existant.
Not only that, but it was vastly more power efficient, and didn’t have the glaring security vulnerabilities that Intel had. All while being on a worse Global Foundries manufacturing process.
Unless you were a PC gamer who also didn’t care about $/perf, Zen1 was the better architecture.