[bcrosby95]

Not only disruptive to their industry, but game changing for those of us writing software. I remember reading all the hoopla over the loss of Dennard scaling 15 years ago (e.g. http://www.gotw.ca/publications/concurrency-ddj.htm). Intel poked along at 2 and 4 core consumer systems for so long.

The argument was always "no one can use more than X cores" - but software seems to trail hardware in these examples, not the reverse. When Zen was first released, many of the less expensive 6 core options performed worse than Intel's similarly priced 4 core chips. But when comparing modern software using those old parts, AMD's 6 core offerings tend to hold up better.

It feels like AMD is finally ushering us into an era where being able to take advantage of large amounts of parallelism is going to become important for almost every developer.