The memo was originally posted on Intel's internal "Circuit News" employee portal and has the catchy title: "AMD competitive profile: Where we go toe-to-toe, why they are resurgent, which chips of ours beat theirs."

What's most surprising about the memo, which was penned by Circuit News Managing Editor Walden Kirsch, is how flattering it is in general to AMD, pointing out that it was the best-performing stock on the S&P 500 for 2018

In terms of Zen 2 and AMD's Ryzen 3000 series, the author notes: "Intel 9th Gen Core processors are likely to lead AMD's Ryzen-based products on lightly threaded productivity benchmarks as well as many gaming benchmarks. For multi-threaded workloads, such as heavy content creation workloads, AMD's Matisse is expected to lead."

All in, the internal memo is a rather insightful and well-reasoned look at the threat that AMD poses to Intel and how the company might respond.