I do hope intel comes back, while I prefer AMD currently (due to no avx512 on intel consumer cpus and me not being interested in having things scheduled on efficiency cores in my desktop pc), if there's no competition anymore who knows what AMD might become...
I'm a gamer, and for Intel to make a comeback for me, they need something that competes with AMD's X3D chips, which absolutely dominate all the gaming benchmarks.
The Core Ultra CPUs are an absolute joke for gaming, often being beaten even by the 14th gen CPUs. The Core Ultras had a major performance regression in L3 cache speed which destroyed gaming performance.
Games love large cache sizes. The Ryzen 9700X has the same number of cores, but a slower clock than a 9800X3D, yet the 9800X3D comes out on top purely because it has 96 MB of L3 cache compared to 32 MB. If Intel would have put out an i9-14900K with 96 MB of L3 cache, it'd probably come out on top.
> Despite Intel still holding the lead with 56.3% of systems validated through CPU-Z, AMD is closing in, now claiming 43.7% of the market.