Intel can reach equal or better performance than AMD only at higher power consumption.

At equal number of active cores and equal power consumption, an AMD CPU has a much higher clock frequency than an Intel CPU. At equal number of active cores and equal clock frequency, an AMD CPU has a much lower power consumption than an Intel CPU.

For desktop and laptop CPUs, Intel can win with this higher power consumption strategy, especially in single-threaded applications, where the fact that Raptor Lake has a higher IPC than Zen 4 also helps.

On the other hand, for server and workstation CPUs, Intel cannot benefit from this trick, because those CPUs are used in multi-threaded applications where they run constantly in thermally-limited conditions.

The Intel Sapphire Rapids CPUs have from many points of view a superior design in comparison with AMD Genoa, but they are severely handicapped by the inferior manufacturing process used by Intel.

Because of that, the Sapphire Rapids CPUs have low clock frequencies when all cores are active and small cache memories. This ensures that they are no match for AMD Genoa and they barely match the previous generation of AMD server CPUs.

The manufacturing process disadvantage is compounded by the stupid Intel policy of randomly disabling various features in most SKUs, with the exception of those that are ridiculously expensive.

This policy ensures that the benchmarks published for Intel are excessively optimistic, because they show the top SKUs, while the SKUs that most people have are crippled, so they may have a much lower performance.

So in servers the Intel CPUs are not competitive at all, except for various special applications where the CPU performance matters very little, e.g. when the cheapest SKUs are good enough for providing a big memory and many PCIe lanes, or when it is acceptable to pay Intel to enable the included accelerators, because the application can benefit from them.

Each brand has its strengths and weaknesses. AMD isn't dominating anymore, but they are still ahead in areas such as AVX512 (absent in Intel Core), the ability to mount more than 8 performant cores in a chip (Intel's intra-core communication architecture is difficult to scale, hence their new P+E approach, which fortunately seems to work well), and their ability to take advantage of the multi-chip process to mount absurd amounts of cache. The multi-chip approach is also a tech advantage that allows them to cut costs.

(Disclaimer: I work at Intel, but not on server products. Opinions are my own.)

There's a lot more that goes into a server platform than just the cores, for instance: the BIOS code, the BMC support, the maturity of the motherboard designs, etc. These are all areas where Intel seems to still have an edge -- but I'm also very excited about our upcoming server architectures on the core/compute side.

> What confuses me is that AMD still has a huge lead for server CPUs. I have not seen massive adoption of AMD in the cloud yet.

This was years ago so the tide may've shifted but: part of it could still be vendor experience and "it works"-experience?

When EPYC gen 1 & 2 came out, we were shopping for a bare metal megaserver spec at work. I got a budget and free rein (except it had to be Dell), and I really wanted to pick EPYC for the better core clocks (which were significant in our build architecture) and more cores and better cost.

With one EPYC spec and one Xeon Gold spec built (EPYC was I think $13k vs $15k?), work was a bit uneasy about AMD processors just yet. Our workload was MSVC compilation but they were concerned about architecture differences, since all of our workstations & laptops were Intels. They preferred paying more because "we already have Xeon servers and they're proven".

So, we ended up getting the Xeon Gold spec instead.