It's hard not to root for AMD when Intel has a track record of sitting on their hands whenever they become the market leader.
Threadripper got killed off because it was starting to compete with AMD's own products, performance increases started to diminish, AMD very much took a short break when were at the top again. The only difference is that Intel managed to stay on top with their Core architecture for so incredibly long.
That's not necessarily bad, of course. This behaviour has led to competition and competition is almost always good for the consumer.
It's good to have competition in the market.
Given how well competition has worked for consumers, I do wonder if there’s some regulatory option here to reduce those back room deals. Given the way the world runs on microprocessors now there’s a decent argument that maintaining a robust market is like what we used to do to prevent one railroad or steel company from getting too much control.
I've owned AMD CPUs before. 386DX-40 and Athlon II and such.
But Threadripper was unreal. And seemed like it was going to be the norm for an era of HEDT.
But AMD got greedy on the promise of corporate desktop dollars, over-stratified, and let a flagship technology fade into "what about Threadripper? No, it's for Lenovo customers."