That's an excellent point, there's a few big gambles I can think of that turned the tides. First, was the 90nm process of both companies. AMDs turned out to be a suprising success reducing vcore and heat dissipation, whereas the Intel 90nm did exactly the opposite, and ran them right into a frequency brick wall.some of that is Intel's gambling and AMD's gambling on things,AMD gambled on the 64 bit market, and on the socket A platform when Intel wouldnt, it could have been real real bad for AMD, instead it turned out very well for them, the old adage "build it and they will come" seems to work !!
The huge gamble AMD took was not 64 bit processing in my opinion as they're processors were still 32 bit capable, and good 32 bit processors at that, but their Hypertransport bus which builds the memory controller into the chip, making it hard for them to switch memory interfaces or other big changes (one of the reasons they're not on DDR2 yet). I guess Intel saw that as a weakness and tried to push DDR2 on the market when it was still overpriced, and I couldn't be happier for AMD to sticking to DDR1, and still want them to skip DDR2 altogether.