They hired Jim Keller to design the Zen architecture around 2012, and he left in 2015. Many people point to him for their current success. He joined Intel in 2018.
But the chiplet architecture, supported by fast Infinity Fabric interconnect is what puts AMD ahead. Intel will have to go same route to stay competitive. And now they are two steps behind.
The smaller dies and modular setup even on the same die gives them so much flexibility in their binning and package integration and must keep defect rates much lower than Intel’s monolithic high core count chips.
Exactly this. Funny Intel is no longer mocking this as dies "glued together".