Yes, Intel does. Quite a bit better.
The comparison made above was SSE / SSE2 at introduction on the Pentium III / IV versus now. AVX is still relatively new across the board, but it provides significant benefits and is absolutely usable in real-world applications and developers are including it in their code, so it has statistical relevance now. Going forward, AVX performance will likely be a differentiator for compute code that is run on the CPU.
99% of what applications? I draw comparisons to the takeup of SSE and SSE2 for a reason: they were out for five or six years before they really came into their own and became a deciding factor for CPU performance. We're what, a few years in for AVX, and we're seeing developer interest and commercial takeup? Yeah, that's the same path that SSE took, and we have no reason to believe that the market will not put it to use. To wit: AMD is including successive AVX improvements in Zen. AVX is statistically relevant.
AVX is 8 years old and has been available on everything from Sandy Bridge / Bulldozer and on. AVX2 is 6 years old and Haswell / Excavator on. AVX512 is three years old and is limited to Phi Accelerators and some very basic support on Skylake X / Cannon lake.
Nobody is claiming that it's not utilized, and AMDs implementation of AVX/AVX2 is as good or better than Intels. The outlier is AVX512, which doesn't share nearly the support base that the earlier 128/256 versions do.
So when you say that AVX performance for Intel eclipses AMD, that's only true of AVX512, a relatively new and (currently) mostly unused extension.
Excluding that extremely new extension, which is a drastic best case for Intel, shows that AMD is equal or better. Hanging your hat on AVX512 performance as either an indicator of current or future performance is a poor choice, but yours to make.
There were few core-level and IPC-level improvements, but Intel has made pretty large improvements to the package. Higher average overclocks for enthusiasts, more cores per socket in every market including mobile, and lower power parts for mobile are all improvements made during the tenure of 14nm Skylake releases. Note that AMD doesn't have a competitive mobile part that could hang with a two generation old Skylake 15w quad-core, let alone the new 10nm 15w Ice Lake quads that have graphics that match AMDs APUs .
When it comes to mobile, and entry-level desktops, SMT4 might actually be pretty useful in keeping cost and power draw down while still maintaining usability for productivity users.
Redirection. Nobody here is talking about mobile, is hasn't been a part of this conversation. But since we're talking about power, how about that power consumption!
I forget, is this one of those scenarios where power consumption matters or not, it's hard to keep track with you.