AMD&#x27;s CPUs do many fewer instructions per cycle as Haswell (in some cases half as many), not to mention Skylake. You can&#x27;t really compare GHz between them.<p>And releasing a new architecture is not exactly feasible if they want to stay in the server, workstation, and desktop markets. That idea behind Itanium actually was to get faster by dropping x86_64, and we see how poorly it worked out.