> and are now a desktop enthusiast favorite as well. The i5/i7 class is outmatched in every metric ($/FLOP, W/$, and W/FLOP) by the Ryzen series.

maybe a couple years ago, at this point Intel is dominating the gaming market, competing in the productivity market despite having fewer cores (i.e. more potent cores), are at least matching Zen3 efficiency (except i9, but you said i5/i7) if not beating (particularly at lower power budgets due to infinity fabric overhead). Ryzen has absolutely lost favor with the enthusiast market due to the significant price increases (in some segments, a 50% increase over last generation) and the refusal to chop prices to remain competitive with intel (justified with "but they can make more money selling Epyc", which is great for them but it doesn't make their products competitive for me as a consumer either).

And AMD has completely abandoned the value market... i3 12100F is listed for $110 at Best Buy (iGPU version is $140), and Intel is in the process of rolling out Celerons for even cheaper rigs (will be nice for HTPC with that iGPU). AMD's cheapest processor has a $300 MSRP and they won't budge on pricing at all given their focus on the server market.

go look at a tech enthusiast forum and nobody is recommending Ryzen anymore. It's overpriced, it no longer has a performance or efficiency advantage (in fact it's rather flopped the other way), and AMD would rather address the server market instead.

this has really shifted in the last 6 months since Alder Lake launched, but really there was a significant niche for recommending 10-series as a budget option given the significant price advantage over AMD. The thing that changed with Alder Lake is that Intel moved back into the performance lead (and matched efficiency) and prices remained the same - leaving them both better and cheaper than AMD. Thing have changed, people don't recommend AMD anymore unless you have a very specific need (like you're buying a 5950X).

Also APUs in particular are rather a flop on desktop. AMD didn't even bother releasing a 7nm APU to the consumer market until... September last year? Up until then it was all 12nm quad-core garbage - and that's GloFo 12nm, so more like Intel 22nm. On top of that, the APUs also had reduced IPC compared to the CPUs of their equivalent architecture (due to less cache). All of the hype around Ryzen was around the non-APU enthusiast chips with no onboard graphics, the APUs were never popular in the desktop segment.

The APUs are nice if you are building a SFF rig with no discrete GPU... but they have a lot of compromises - reduced IPC, PCIe 3.0, and up until September they didn't have any that weren't limited to PCIe 3.0x8 (5000G series moves this to 3.0x16). They have no HDMI 2.1 support, no HDMI VRR support, no AV1 support, and the worst hardware encoder (i.e. Teams videoconferencing quality/etc) on the market. If you really want a gaming-focused SFF rig with iGPU only, they are the best available, but they were never popular, and AMD never really pushed them the way they did the enthusiast chips.

(HEDT is another segment that's been abandoned... AMD still has not released Zen3 processors, it's been 16 months now, and who knows whether AMD will try the same "release it for pro but not for consumer" crap again like they did with the APUs.)