Comment by MrDOS
4 hours ago
> AMD designed Bulldozer with a very long pipeline, betting they could sacrifice efficiency per clock cycle in exchange for extraordinarily high clock speeds
It blows my mind that AMD watched Intel try to do basically the same thing only a few years prior with NetBurst, and fail so badly that they had to scrap that entire evolutionary branch and start over – and AMD still went and did it again themselves anyway.
I remember rumblings a decade-ish ago that basically their hand was possibly forced to release the thing to avoid a full on revolt about abandoning all of their work; after all, Intel had been investing in deep pipelines for a while before, they were strapped for cash after the ATI Acquisition, and other 'server-ish' CPUs had done CMT type things in the past (keeping in mind that AMD was seeing a huge surge in server market share due to Hammer.)