system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: How did AMD which is a much smaller company than Intel manage to produce a competitive Ryzen CPU?

I am curious to find out how did AMD manage to pull a rabbit out of a hat and get such a competitive well priced CPU like Ryzen. It is great from a consumer perspective but I want to find out if Intel just got lazy and were caught with their pants down or if they simply are holding back on releasing a new CPU architecture that would decimate Ryzen? 

Intel is a much much bigger company with massive R&D budget, and a lot more resources. Besides historically with the exceptions of few periods of time they were always in the lead. So my question is how did AMD manage to achieve this, did they reverse engineer Intel CPUs? Was the technology that Intel was using become more widely available. Or did they simply get lucky? 

I do sincerely hope that whatever AMD did is sustainable and that they can continue to exist and remain competitive for many more decade.
gpt
The thing is that in IT you need good engnieers. 

If we go back to the K6-3 and K7 generation, Intel had its P3 Coppermines and wanted to develop a new CPU which was geared more towards higher Mhz figures then efficiency, 

And at the same time they aquired 2 companies, Nexgen and Alpha DEC, They aquired them for patents and let go most of the engnieers, which went to work for AMD. 

Thats how the K6-3 and the K7 lead to a period in which AMD dominated the market, The athlon series was able to out run and out price Intels Willamette, Northwood and prescott processors which were less efficient and more expensive. 

The thing is that this came off a period in which intel was "coasting" on the success of the P3, so basicaly they were improving a bit the processor, raising its speed abit and since they had no real competition, the processors from Cyrix and AMD at the time couldnt compete against the P3. 

And then AMD smacked them over the head with the K7. 

The same thing happened now. the only real competition they had was AMD. 

The i3, i5 and i7 had a significant performance lead over the AMD phenom chips and were able to performe around 15% better then equivalent AMD parts while consuming around 30% less power, 

Intel chips were running 95 watt and then 75 watt while high end processors from AMD were struggling to provide comparable performance with 120 and 145 watt TDP, and as a act of desperation AMD released a 200 watt TDP processor. 

So basically this gave Intel very little reason to innovate, you had series 2000, 3000, 4000... core i3/5/7 processors in which each generation would basicaly only improve  slightly bumping performance around 5-10% between generations basically stagnating CPU arquitecture. 

so AMD started a core redesign project which allowed them to catch up. 

The good thing is that every time AMD catches up, Intel does a major redesign, so its very probable that the next generation core processors will bring some real innovation.