why not at one time AMD was king even over Intel in fact i remember CPU wars till AMD wtf up ... then they lost out big time and Intel took over why cant AMD do it again ..? ..
AMD is a lot different then they were when they all most went out of business a while back and i was told are working on the next die of 10nm ..
AMD has held the outright performance crown over Intel during 2 periods.
(1) Athlon "Thunderbird" days - the Thunderbird was a hair more efficient per clock vs the Pentium III across the board AND the top Thunderbird chips clocked HIGHER.
Eventually Intel came out with the Pentium 4 and got it clocking high enough to overcome the lower IPC handicap - AMD was ahead for 2-3 years though.
The Athlon "Palomino" showed up a bit too late to hold on to the crown (though it kept things CLOSE for a while), and didn't scale fast enough to stay competative at the top.
(2) Athlon 64.
Intel had NOTHING competative prior to introduction of the "Core" line.
AMD had another 2-3 year lead and for the first time made some serious incursion into SERVER manufacturers (the Thunderbird managed some SMALL gains but nothing major).
AMD was also very very close in the K5 vs. Pentium days, prior to Intel introducing the MMX instruction set on the second generation Pentium-166. That timeframe came down to instruction mix a lot - Intel won on floating Point operations by a lot, AMD won on integer operations by a much narrower degree.
I don't count the 386 and earlier days, when the IBM-forced "AMD as second source" agreement was still in force.
I honestly don't see Ryzen making any serious dent in cryptomining though - there are too few CPU-mineable coins and ALL of them except Monero are way too small (and even Monero isn't real competative for CPUs vs GPUs) to make it worth spending a lot on Ryzen based hardware.