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It's not so much Intel were ahead in terms of architecture design, but rather AMD was way behind. Bulldozer was a disaster, and Zen is a ground-up redesign that

It's not so much Intel were ahead in terms of architecture design, but rather AMD was way behind. Bulldozer was a disaster, and Zen is a ground-up redesign that means AMD have a decent core at the level of Intel's again. But AMD have two advantages Intel don't. Their Zen architecture is designed for multi-chip module scalability, so they can deliver higher core counts at much better yields (especially important on new process nodes!) and thus manufacturing costs than Intel's monolithic designs. And AMD uses 3rd-party fabs that, unlike Intel, are already doing great on the new process node. 2019 will be a reckoning for Intel.

dragontamer 8y ago
> Bulldozer was a disaster I dunno if it was as much a "disaster" as it was Intel's Sandy Bridge doing so well. Intel's Sandy Bridge (2600k / 2700k) were HUGE improvements back in 2011. Bulldozer was a step-wider (the cores were roughly the same as K10 but you'd get 8-cores instead of 4), and Piledriver / Steamroller incrementally improved on the formula. Bulldozer managed to increase core counts from ~4 (AMD Phenom) to 8 with Bulldozer. Sure, the 8 "cores" of Bulldozer shared a decoder and perhaps was more appropriately a 4-core with hyperthreading... but it was still a core-to-core improvement compared to K10. https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/piledriver-k10-cpu-overclocking,3584.html https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/piledriver-k10-cpu-over... But the incremental upgrades to AMD's K10 were just no match for the 20%+ boosts that Intel was doing with their Sandy Bridge architecture. Ultimately, Intel's Hyperthreads (4c/8t) were roughly the same as AMD's "8 core (4-decoders)" setup... because Sandy Bridge was just so far ahead of the game.
- TazeTSchnitzel 8y ago
  Bulldozer was less performant than its predecessor once you factor in the process node. That's why it was a disaster: AMD managed to design a worse processor and were stuck with it for years. They did make it less bad over time, but it still sucked.
  - MrRadar 8y ago
    This. Bulldozer was (ironically) AMD's Netburst moment. They made a speculative play ("modules" in the case of Bulldozer, long pipelines in the case of Netburst) to chase high core counts/clock speeds (respectively) and the technology didn't end up panning out like they expected on top of performing worse out-of-the-gate than the architectures they were meant to succeed. The difference is that Intel had the cash and political clout to wait out Netburst and force the market to take it while Bulldozer nearly killed AMD (which only held on thanks to its GPU division, itself now in crisis due to lack of competitive products due to under-investment).

dragontamer 8y ago

> Bulldozer was a disaster I dunno if it was as much a "disaster" as it was Intel's Sandy Bridge doing so well. Intel's Sandy Bridge (2600k / 2700k) were HUGE improvements back in 2011. Bulldozer was a step-wider (the cores were roughly the same as K10 but you'd get 8-cores instead of 4), and Piledriver / Steamroller incrementally improved on the formula. Bulldozer managed to increase core counts from ~4 (AMD Phenom) to 8 with Bulldozer. Sure, the 8 "cores" of Bulldozer shared a decoder and perhaps was more appropriately a 4-core with hyperthreading... but it was still a core-to-core improvement compared to K10. https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/piledriver-k10-cpu-overclocking,3584.html https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/piledriver-k10-cpu-over... But the incremental upgrades to AMD's K10 were just no match for the 20%+ boosts that Intel was doing with their Sandy Bridge architecture. Ultimately, Intel's Hyperthreads (4c/8t) were roughly the same as AMD's "8 core (4-decoders)" setup... because Sandy Bridge was just so far ahead of the game.

TazeTSchnitzel 8y ago
Bulldozer was less performant than its predecessor once you factor in the process node. That's why it was a disaster: AMD managed to design a worse processor and were stuck with it for years. They did make it less bad over time, but it still sucked.
- MrRadar 8y ago
  This. Bulldozer was (ironically) AMD's Netburst moment. They made a speculative play ("modules" in the case of Bulldozer, long pipelines in the case of Netburst) to chase high core counts/clock speeds (respectively) and the technology didn't end up panning out like they expected on top of performing worse out-of-the-gate than the architectures they were meant to succeed. The difference is that Intel had the cash and political clout to wait out Netburst and force the market to take it while Bulldozer nearly killed AMD (which only held on thanks to its GPU division, itself now in crisis due to lack of competitive products due to under-investment).