[hyperplane]

For as much as AMD shows promise in their graphics line, if one thing is clear it is that the Bulldozer architecture has been a humiliating failure on the CPU side: extremely high TDPs and terrible performance vs. equivalent Intel *y Bridge/Haswell cores. It's been universally panned for most workloads since its release date made worse by AMD's marketing efforts leading up to its launch.

I wonder what has happened to the Bulldozer design team at AMD at this point and whether or not they even still work there at all.

[gnoway]

I'm not sure this is all the design team's fault.

I remember reading an article a while back re: changes from hand-drawn manual layout to automated layout methods for the chips. The assertion was that manual layout is often better for compute performance, while automated layout makes more efficient use of die area.

AMD, of course, spun off GlobalFoundries years ago and now pays a 3rd party to fab their processors. They also led the charge to incorporate graphics cores into the same die, and modern GPUs are very transistor-intensive.

Basically, I would not be surprised if this is as much about process as it is about design.