Andy Glew has a few things to say about Bulldozer and considering his background and experience, you may want to listen what he says. Lots of details about the inner workings of Intel and AMD projects :

BRIEF:

AMD's Bulldozer is an MCMT (MultiCluster MultiThreaded)
microarchitecture. That's my baby!


DETAIL:


Thursday was both a very good day and a very bad day for me. Good,
because my MCMT ideas finally seem to be going into a product. Bad,
because I ended up driving 4 hours from where I work with IV in the
Seattle area back to Portland, to my wife who was taken to a hospital
emergency room. The latter is personal. The former is, well, personal
too, but also professional.


I can't express how good it feels to see MCMT become a product. It's
been public for years, but it gets no respect until it is in a product.
It would have been better if I had stayed at Intel to see it through.
I know that I won't get any credit for it. (Except from some of the guys
who were at AMD at the time.) But it feels good nevertheless.


The only bad thing is that some guys I know at AMD say that Bulldozer is
not really all that great a product, but is shipping just because AMD
needs a model refresh. "Sometimes you just gotta ship what you got." If
this is so, and if I deserve any credit for CMT, then I also deserve
some of the blame. Although it might have been different, better, if I
had stayed.......
http://groups.google.com/group/comp....736a56?q&pli=1

Let's hope his contacts at AMD are wrong and the product lives up to the hype. Otherwise, there would me quite a few facepalms around here. Read his other posts in the thread, it's fascinating how many different paths AMD took and ended up with the current K10, the lousiest of all.