if AMD was once the top dog in CPU manufacturing. when did Intel finally turn the table?

Intel are not more efficient, or at least not in value-for-money terms.

They just spend massively more on advertising & trying to brainwash people that they are better...

Simple public facts & figures:

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+FX-83...

The AMD consumer CPUs are not the fastest you can buy, but the are vastly superior in the performance-vs-cost league.

Even the Passmark benchmarks seem messed up or got-at - the current, 2015 high-end multi CPU chart shows Intel at the top with figures of 30,278

The historical one from 2012 put AMD at the top with 32,450 - using four CPUs costing roughly $600 each, so $2,400 vs. the lower Intel score at somewhere around $5,000..

The AMD setup is both faster and cheaper.

Figures:

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/multi_cpu_pt7.html

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/multi_cpu.html

Computers are steadily changing to multi-core systems and AMD appears to be pushing that, rather than competing in single cores.

The Oak Ridge National Laboratory's new supercomputer, a Cray Titan system, uses AMD opteron 16 core CPUs; 18,688 of them giving 299,008 cores.

Hi the issue is about expenditure of those that build laptops and want the maximum profits out of processor chips in storage. yes some manufactures have been the problem hanging on to large stocks of processors and not moving forward. so yes currently intel have started to come alive again finding out that AMD where selling more because they sold 8 core processors the black edition over clocked at 4 ghz whereas the intel quad core with it's so called multi threading was meant to be a good .. no way and no how.

so now even in desktop gaming we see the xenon processors coming into the retail markets no longer just for servers. so who ever thinks Intel has court up needs to watching that other market the 256 core market and later the 1024 core markets that is when intel will really catch a cold.

AMD was never the top dog in sales of CPUs.

Intel made what the government called illegal deals with computer manufacturers saying the manufacturers couldn't make PC's with AMD processors or they would lose their sweetheart pricing deal on the Intel processors.

It was the competition between the two that caused better processors.

im pretty sure one of the original athons was one of the last processors by amd to beat intel, back when pentium was the best intel had to offer, but amd really lost their edge when the 2nd gen core i series came out. however for cheap gaming/rendering amd still holds their own, unfortunately this isnt enough and amd hasnt had a positive quarter in years

After the 4770k