A report from global technology analyst firm, Canalys, has suggested that AMD could pull ahead of Intel in terms of raw performance in 2019. Although the report has since disappeared from the internet, it didn't clarify in what sense AMD would pull ahead, but since its Threadripper line already offers better multithreaded performance than just about anything Intel has on sale, we could be looking at AMD's next-generation Ryzen CPUs dominating Intel in single threaded settings.
None of this is guaranteed, but as PCGN points out, the report stated that Canalys would "anticipate the possibility of AMD surpassing Intel on CPU performance in 2019. That would most likely be referring to AMD's anticipated Zen 2 microarchitecture, which would theoretically be Ryzen 3000-series CPUs. Those chips will feature a die shrink to 7nm and should offer strong multithreaded performance, as well as improvements to clock speed and instructions, per clock power potentially leading to them outstripping Intel's only slightly improved ninth-generation CPUs and even the 10nm Cannon Lake chips which are still far from being ready for a wide release.
Other slides suggest that AMD will continue to be a dominant force in the entry-level market too, with its APUs that combine Ryzen processing power with Vega graphics offering powerful general computing and enough performance for off-hours gaming. The slides claim that this would be perfect for office environments which want to allow their employees to do some basic gaming in the off hours.
Do you think AMD's next-generation CPUs can give Intel even more competition?