[ac29]

Given that he was only at AMD for 3 years and now works for Intel, I wonder if AMD will be struggling again after Zen 2/3 -- I seem to recall he designed "multiple" Zen versions before leaving, but cant find any comments from AMD to that effect.

[clarry]

Regardless of who designed it, I'm concerned about how much progress Zen3 (and so on) can make. Zen was a massive leap, Zen 2 looks like it'll be a great upgrade, but can it go on like this? If not, what happens next? "AMD didn't absolutely blast Intel out of the water, so let's all go back to buying nothing but Intel."

[nullwasamistake]

Bulldozer was mistake that cost AMD years of advancements. They tried to do what Intel did a few years before. Design for clock speed and nothing else, figuring the 4ghz ceiling was easy to break.

Intel did this with P4 "netburst" architecture. They hit a frequency wall that made thier new deeply pipelined CPU worthless. This is when AMD caught up last time with the athlon series.

Intel actually went back to the design of the Pentium III!! With higher IPC, a few upgrades lifted from the P4, and new processes, it gave birth to the Core series.

The Intel processors we have today still share more design history with the P3 than the P4. And since then, Intel has focused on IPC over clock speed.

The crazy part was AMD making the same mistake years later with Bulldozer. Makes me wonder if the remedy was the same... Go back and update the Athlon cores.

The ancient Athlon/P3 IPC is amazingly good compared to today's chips if you scale them by clock speed and core count. Perhaps half, which is impressive for the age of the chip. All these bugs affecting over a decade of CPU design tells us these chips share a lot of the same logic, if not entire blocks unchanged for more than a decade.

[rjsw]

I'm typing this on a Bulldozer system. It is still fine for what I need it for - mostly compiling software, and provided a lot more cores than the equivalent Intel CPU at the same price point.

[eropple]

Nobody's saying they were unusable. But like--I do video production and was pricing out my first live video mixer around that time. I was ready to throw down for a Bulldozer build immediately because of how wide the processor was and had to do the proverbial "hard pull up away from the mountainside" because of how bad the throughput was.

Instead, ended up going i7-875K -> i5-3570K -> Ryzen 1600 -> Ryzen 3700X (probably, this year). So like, I'm glad to see AMD back in the game, but Bulldozer was pretty rough.

[potta_coffee]

I'm still using mine for gaming daily, obviously it's not high end, but it was $99 like...9 years ago? I don't remember when actually. I've been computing since I was young and it's the best value I've ever purchased. I can still do just about anything I want to right now.

[ShinTakuya]

> The crazy part was AMD making the same mistake years later with Bulldozer. Makes me wonder if the remedy was the same... Go back and update the Athlon cores.

I mean at the time the only thing on the minds of consumers was those GHz. So the only way to stay in the market was to hunt those GHz even if it meant some long term pain. After hitting the 3GHz/4GHz frequency walls consumers began to realise that processors are distinguished by more than frequency (obviously the lay person still doesn't quite understand but they're more likely to buy based on i7 > i5 than 3Ghz > 2.5Ghz these days).

[clarry]

> I mean at the time the only thing on the minds of consumers was those GHz.

No, AMD dispelled that long before Bulldozer, and even Intel had abandoned the GHz game years ago with the Core lineup.

You're thinking late 90s, Bulldozer happened in 2011. People got over the GHz mindset in the early-mid 2000s when the market told 'em we're now going to increase core count instead, and before that when Athlon labeled CPUs like 1800+ (it's not 1.8GHz but it's as fast as one!).