I ran an AMD Phenom II x4 955 Black Edition for ~5 years, then gave it to a friend who ran it for another 5 years. We overclocked the hell out of it up to 4ghz, and there is no way in hell you were getting gaming performance that good from Intel dollar-for-dollar, so no AMD did not suck from Core 2 on. You need to shift that timeframe up to Bulldozer, and even then Bulldozer and the other FX CPUs ended up aging better than their Intel counterparts, and at their adjusted prices were at least reasonable products.

Doesn’t change the fact AMD lied about Bulldozer, nor does it change Intel using its market leader position to release single-digit performance increases for a decade and strip everything i5 and lower down to artificially make i7 more valuable. Funny how easy it is to forget how shit it was to be a PC gamer then after two crypto booms.