It is probably good that Chips and Cheese stays technical and objective. But, this was from the pre-Zen bad days of AMD, right? I wonder if a “where’d it all go wrong” post would be more interesting. Or, maybe more optimistically, “how’d this set things up for Zen.”
The interconnect didn't have very much to do with what went wrong or setting up for Zen.
AMD made a killer design with Athlon64 that should have taken over the entire industry and made them the largest hardware company on the planet. Instead, Intel leveraged their market position to make it economically infeasible for computer manufacturers to buy AMD chips.
AMD was out of money which limited options. Denard Scaling had just failed, but Moore's Law was still in effect and multithreading was hyped as the future of everything. This made a big argument for lots of smaller cores and the most area-efficient way to do this was sharing less-used resources resulting in AMD betting big on small-core CMT.
At the same time, AMD's ATI division was under pressure to make a new, flexible GPU design (that became GCN) and the cult of Nvidia (even knowingly shipping massive numbers of defective chips then having a worse GPU than GCN still wasn't enough to lose market dominance).
The interconnect was a lower-priority redesign, so they slapped a bandaid on it and pushed the redesign down the road.
I think you're being too nice about Bulldozer. It really was a big fat unforced error. Approximately no one wants to buy a CPU that's significantly slower than the last one at common (single core) tasks.
Today, Intel is still selling more CPUs than AMD in most market segments even though they are usually worse.
(I did some research. Apparently, Bulldozer was initially supposed to be a fairly "fat" core single-threaded, just with more multithreading. Something didn't work out, and the crisis was managed by scaling back things that really hurt performance.)
Lower single core throughput with more cores is just always a bad bet. Existing software runs better on faster cores, people buy hardware to run existing software, and people write software to run well on hardware that other people already own.
The reason for AMD's resurgence right now is not that they have more cores, but that they have better cores. If they had even faster cores, and fewer of them per die, they'd be selling even better.
Well. I got the very first Ryzen model, the 1800X, because it had twice the amount of cores that Intel was selling, and they were just a few percent slower per core. If they had been 40% slower, I would have passed.
My most important workload - compiling C++ - is atypically parallel, but even there, single-core is important, too.
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.
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.
Athlon64 should have been the wake up call for intel to focus on engineering to beat AMD, but they decided they would bully the market into a worse product forever.
... It was exactly that. In the following decade, Intel comprehensively beat AMD. But then they let up, and started spending all their money on idiotic acquisitions instead.
The Core CPUs were excellent designs that didn't sacrifice performance while hitting a much lower power target than the P4. Intel was saved by the fact that the design team in Israel didn't go down the path of the P4 aiming for 10 GHz and then wildly missing the mark due to power constraints.
AMD's Bulldozer was their attempt at a P4 style core: increase clocks at all costs. Again, aiming for ridiculous clock rates without considering the power cost was a mistake. However, some of the design techniques AMD came up with to hit higher clock speeds live on in today's Ryzen designs (just as ideas from the P4 live on in today's Intel CPUs).
Tabula made the same design mistake in their FPGA fabric: the thinking was that registers are cheap and memory blocks can be run at ridiculous clock speeds in order to share, multiplex and reuse transistors across LUTs. Great in theory if it wasn't for the ridiculous cost of power and the complexity of the software to make it work.
The power wall is real. Not every hardware design team makes the right choices early in a design when estimating power use and constraining the design space appropriately. The difference is that the tools used to estimate power consumption of a hardware design today are far better than they were 20 years ago as a direct consequence of these (and other) failures.
That's probably in their Bulldozer article [1]. But this article is about memory access on their APUs; you just have to accept the CPU was what it was, no need to dwell on it here.
