Yes, AMD will have to raise the bar again with Zen4 to catch Intel, but that should be the usual, with both companies launching competing products and beating each other after a new launch.
Zen3 with Vcache is just a stop-gap before they release Zen4 as the extra memory only benefits gaming (or, at least, that's what was said when their plans were releaved) and, as such, it won't be a valid product to discuss gauge what AMD will be able to do with Zen4.
Zen4 will have the problem of staying with PCIe 4.0 in what's quite an odd decision, but we'll have to see how much of a handicap that will actually be. It's not like GPUs are bottlenecked by PCIe 4.0, at least apparently, and the NVMe drices will be crazy expensive and offer little real world benefits (seriously, even the jump from 3.0 to 4.0 brought little improvements in non-synthetic benchmarks).
We'll have to keep an eye on DDR5 and the latency problems that we've seen in some leaks and if AMD will also suffer from it given its dependence on RAM frequencu and latency for its Infinity Fabric.
Also, we can't forget about the power consumption. We know that despite its use of low power cores, Alder Lake will be another power hungry beast, and AMD also increase their numbers in that aspect.
In any case, interesting times ahead of us!
Please excuse my bad English.
Currently gaming on a PC with an i5-4670k@stock (for now), 16Gb RAM 1600 MHz and a GTX 1070
Steam / Live / NNID : jonxiquet Add me if you want, but I'm a single player gamer.
