And while the TSMC 7nm proved to be very successfull for AMD, Nvidia did mostly better with 8nm, And Intel shows signs of catching up with 10nm.
I'm personally not sold on the 7nm AMD CPU design, while my 5800X runs fine and fast it's hot at idle and has temp spikes that hit the high 80's in normal use.
It's fine I'm sure, just not something I'm used to. Just a lack of refinement imho.
Hmm, I honestly don't know enough about node design to say one is "better" than another. Short of putting out the same/similar architectures on both it may be hard to tell. It was pretty obvious when Intel did Tick/Tock, but now you don't really see that much any longer. Undoubtedly you see a big difference between AMD and nVidia design philosophies, as well as Intel vs AMD - so how much is on the design and how much is on the node, I couldn't honestly say.
The hot idle I think has more to do with AMD's power strategy -- I've heard you can knock that down if you play with idle voltages and the Windows Power Plan, but I've never fooled with it - all of the AMD Zen 2 and Zen 3's we have at the house seem to ramp up to loaded clocks well and don't seem to suffer negatively from a higher-than-I'm-used-to idle temp - although they all exhibit it like you mention.
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That said, my point is that AMD has everything staked on one process node at one fab. Every single product they are making. And you only get so much allocation from that fab, so you have to divy all that up to fit inside your allocation.
All of AMD's eggs are in one basket right now. It's a bet that they did ok by when they were the underdog and just need to prove they can do something despite a tiny marketshare, but it won't allow them to become the prominent market leader they want to be.
Unless they can either diversify to other nodes/fabs, or afford to get a much larger allocation from TSMC (of which they are competing against the likes of Apple, nVidia, and Intel for that constrained resource) - I think they are more or less doomed to accepting they can only ever serve a small portion of the marketshare. It will be just like the Athlon all over again - it may have been as good or better than Pentium at the time, but the scarcity (due to lack of fab capacity - the exact same thing) drove costs out of whack and it never was able to break open significant marketshare.
