Quote Originally Posted by mstp2009 View Post
FYI, the design for K10 was pretty much set in stone before C2D was released. There was little AMD could do to tweak the design so late in the game. I re-design would have taken about 18 months (longer), not counting debugging.
If that's the case, then why only make such a small upgrade from the start? Common, your competition is bound to wow you at some point and time, and since they can't afford to keep designing new architectures at the rate intel can, k10 should have been a huge upgrade that at least doubled k8's performance as it was planned to last for multiple years. We can now see that amd plans to do a k10.5 and k11 very rapidly after k10's launch and hopefully they can improve their ipc and give the cpus more cache+higher clockspeeds, but still, that should have been done from the start, same way 65nm should have been down over a year ago for them, not try to fix it at the last moment, and that's why they got caught with their pants down