> Did Bulldozer really lose or was the competition cheating?
Bulldozer and it’s competition were both designed at a time where leaking information to another process on the same physical core was outside the threat profile CPU memory protection was designed to mitigate against. Intel was optimizing aggressively within the envelope of expectations at the time, which were upended by the rise of cloud computing.
Worst case I see is approximately 33% performance penalty in aggregate for Xeon parts, with much worse performance in specific scenarios. Comparing the original Bulldozer benchmarks, this does close the gap like GP suggested.
Also, refresh your memory on how the mitigations work because there’s definitely an impact for most programs.
Semi-custom (aka console) chips kept them afloat, and they executed well on Ryzen while Intel made modest year-over-year improvements. Doesn't mean they weren't working on a relatively tight R&D budget, though.
Ryzen worked in part because it didn't try to be super-clever. Bulldozer was very opinionated about how computing would look (cheap cpu + big coprocessor) whereas Zen is much more practical