[paulmd]

quad-core workstations have been available for years, I literally have one from 2010 and I doubt it was the first even then. There were probably Core2 Quad or Phenom X4 workstations.

AMD had their own quad-core laptops available for a long time too, the Excavator/Piledriver series goes back many years as well.

Cheap dual-cores have been around forever as well, this is not something that AMD has brought on with Zen. This is not really a distinctive product in most ways, it's just a replacement for those old cheapo Excavator products for bargain-basement laptops. So I'm not sure what you're trying to say here other than 'AMD good'.

dual-cores have always been the standard for ultrabooks, but those laptops are literally defined as eschewing performance in favor of making it thinner and lighter. You make a processor that pulls half the power, the workstations will take twice the cores and the ultrabooks will slice off another 2mm of thickness and stay with dual cores. Zen did not change this dynamic.

Yes, Zen2 is a good product, this is not a Zen2 chip, nor is it really notably higher core count or anything else. It's a replacement for A8 piledrivers.