AMD's Bobcat and Bulldozer

[chew*]

Not to mention it would have needed a respin as it was to get the clocks up.

[AliG]

Assuming you could get the clocks to 4 GHz, how close to Sandy Bridge do you think Llano with l3 would have been?

[chew*]

I think that answer might be answered more accurately when we see Ryzen 32m results.

IMO I think it has some Llano lineage under the hood.

[AliG]

IMO I think it has some Llano lineage under the hood.

Does that seem like one of those ironic circle of life things?

P4 was a horrendous flop because they prioritized frequency over pipeline efficiency, Core Mobile built of P3 and gave the foundation of Core 2 Duo, and then Sandy Bridge et al took it to the next level. AMD seemed to completely ignore Intel's lessons, and built Bulldozer by prioritizing frequency efficiency, developed a mobile CPU that was actually very competitive in the APU space, and then Zen took that foundation to mass production of efficient octocores.

You'd think chief engineers would take a few seconds to look at the history books every now and then before signing off on billion dollar development plans.