All they've got left at this point is "I want the best gaming performance and literally nothing else matters".
For the average person maybe that's all they've got left.
But technically their are still ahead in some interesting ways when we look at x86 extensions:
By decreasing order of impact:
AVX 512
TSX
SGX
Their next architecture could bring bfloat16 too but I wonder how useful that would be on a CPU instead of on a GPU.
AVX512 and TSX can give Intel a BIG performance advantage in some niche (but foundational) applications
Is it a 30% perf/$ advantage though? In most comparisons I've seen Intel lost horrendously even with AVX-512 code compared to EPYC 2 when price was factored in. Doubly so if the cost of electricity and cooling is included, because the watts/core for AMD is much lower than anything Intel has.
Compare against 3950x and 3960x and you will see it's closer to the 3960x for quite a bit cheaper and with 6 less cores. And that's not entirely AVX-512 code.
Also power consumption is a little overblown since all CPUs scale their frequencies so even though mine runs at 5GHz it will spend most of the day below 2GHz or so.
Their next architecture could bring bfloat16 too but I wonder how useful that would be on a CPU instead of on a GPU.
AVX512 and TSX can give Intel a BIG performance advantage in some niche (but foundational) applications