alt Hacker NewsFor me, it was core count, price and energy efficiency (especially after a hefty power limit reduction that costs barely any performance). Intel made faster single cores most of the time, but at ridiculous power consumption and lower total core count.
Zen 1's $/perf was so good. After I booted a freshly-unboxed Zen box and ran some benchmarks for work (RIP on-prem server rooms), I bought a bunch of $AMD at the next market open, for about $12 IIRC. It's shocking to me it took almost a decade for AMD to outsell Intel, the value proposition was evident on day 1.