Disagree....More like Pentium 4 vs Athlon (non-xp) again. Athlon killed it. Then XP came. Then 64.
Intel had the Pentium 4, which was a lousy ass chip.
Right. Netburst was a complete dead end. It was supposed to be this deeply-pipelined architecture with deadly accurate branch prediction that was going to scale to 8 or 10 GHz. It was also introduced with serial RDRAM which was a few percent faster than parallel SDRAM while being much more expensive, much hotter, and patented by Rambus. RDRAM was such a flop that Intel had to quickly roll out new chipsets that used the older SDRAM. This is when Athlon and Duron started to creep into the market share. It was a much cheaper platform and could use your old, existing RAM from a P-II or P-III system.
Athlon XP added SSE instructions and was about 10% faster than Athlon clock-for-clock. During this time, Intel did manage to make some very high-clocked P4's that were usually faster than Athlon XP's but at a steep premium. There were also oddball things you could do with Athlon XP Mobile CPU's such as overclocking(unlocked multiplier) or running in dual-socket setups. For DIY system builders, an Athlon XP-M could be made to run faster than any comparably-priced P4.
The real trouble for Intel started when they rolled out Prescott P4's, which were not much faster than the previous parts, while running much, much hotter. At about the same time, AMD decided to move the memory controller onto the CPU die with Athlon64 / Opteron chips. This led to massive improvement in memory throughput, comparable to the difference between a hard drive versus an SSD. The marginal CPU performance advantage, massive memory throughput advantage, and nominally lower power and heat all at a lower price was an absolute win for AMD.
AMD's Opteron of this time also scaled with dual-core and up to 8 sockets far beyond anything Xeon had to offer.
After that, Core architecture landed. AMD's CPU performance advantage evaporated instantly. Core2 was a faster, cooler CPU, but still had a frontside bus and no onboard memory controller. AMD still had a slight advantage in some cases(memory performance) and was still a better bang for the buck.
Intel unveiled the Core i-series with integrated memory controller. This is when any advantage AMD had was completely eliminated.
AMD then launched K10 architecture (Phenom), which never performed or scaled well. It also had a serious bug (TLB bug) that when patched caused a 5-20% performance hit. It was AMD's Netburst moment that, like Netburst, drug on for almost a decade. Intel got comfortable, fat, and lazy with their lead. Intel performance received incremental bumps while prices went up like hell.
Intel announced their 10nm Ice Lake architecture would launch in early 2019 or even late 2018. They've never succeeded as of now in making these parts. Intel's last major architecture release was in 2013 with Haswell, and they've been stuck at 14nm since 2015. That gave AMD plenty time to develop and improve Zen architecture.
Almost 20 years later, the whole thing is repeating again with AMD pulling into the lead.
Intel is going to be bringing Sapphire Rapids on 2021 with Pcie 5.0 and DDR5, and 2022 with Granite Rapids on 7nm. Since Mac Pro is basically 2020 product, those are most likely going to be next round of updates for Mac Pro.
If Apple was planning to switch to AMD, then new Mac Pro would have been already based on Threadripper 3 which is launching around same time as those Mac Pros are.
Yeah, and Intel is releasing 10nm Ice Lake in first quarter 2019 too. Just wait. (Sarcasm)