4 ms·

I think AMD was both lucky and good. They came out with a forward thinking design that could bring them back from the brink, but I'm not sure their stuff would

I think AMD was both lucky and good. They came out with a forward thinking design that could bring them back from the brink, but I'm not sure their stuff would have sold if Intel hadn't left them an opening. Most importantly was Intel's failure to execute on 10nm, global foundries 14nm wouldn't have compared as favorably to 10nm even with more cores. And since Intel was stubbornly refusing to sell more cores on anything but their expensive HEDT platform there was a market segment being neglected.

ahartmetz 1y ago
Zen was actually, in a way, a conservative design. They specifically mentioned "performance compatibility" with Intel - they couldn't be weirdly slow in some workloads because of an exotic design. You could say that they had the luxury of not having to aim for the moon because Intel was pretty much parked on the ground, with a failing new process and no ambition to increase core count. Against the original SV ethos, against Andy Grove, just plain old greed and complacency.