what's unsaid is the role that collaboration played in the development of Epyc procs. AMD went on a "listening tour" of potential clients, of which Google is the largest. they spelled out the difference in scale and affordability that Epyc would provide. they offered the benefits of custom silicon at a fraction of the price (incl. operating costs i.e. power & heat) of Xeon. we all know how reluctant Intel was to change anything they thought was their golden goose. this reluctance cost them heavily as they've only have a sliver of this market now. they're more expensive to buy and operate and are far less capable. Intel is getting wise though about their bloated Xeon skus, the next gen will have Software Upgradable Features so they'll only be making one die per category (cores/threads) and the end user pays to unlock the feature set they want. it's a really good idea for the backbone of Intel Xeon clients, but it won't be doing much in Cloud Compute, they'll be elsewhere.