AMD cuts to the core with 'Bulldozer' Opterons

[savantu]

I have no idea who Andy Glew is, but he left the company several years ago.

I am pretty sure the older guys from the CPU teams know who Andy Glew is.

I work with engineering teams and the general feeling is that future prospects today are far better than they have ever been, so I am not sure what his agenda is.

Umh none. The guy is simply an uber geek who happens to have quitte a reputation in the CPU world for coming with revolutionary new stuff.
Besides, he is extremely happy that AMD is incorporating his idea of a cluster uarch; the bad news come from AMD people themselves if you read his post.
What you feel <> what architects inside the company feel.

The world seems happy to declare bulldozer dead before anyone ever has silicon in their hand. As someone on the inside, I will say that as I look at our products, there is a pretty strong belief that Magny Cours will be a significant game changer in the server business and that Bulldozer will have a similar, if not greater impact on the market.

How is Magny-Cours going to be a game changer when a 6 core Istanbull loses on all major benchmarks to a 4 core Nehalem, and that is at roughly similar frequency. For MC, you double the core count in an inneficient way, drop the frequency to 2.1-2.3GHz. Scaling would definetly suffer.
OTOH Nehalem EX adresses exactly that with an innovative ring bus uarch for connecting the cores and the L3 ( same as GPUs ) and a few other goodies.

Considering this, will AMDs position in the market improve ? I doubt it. At best it will stay the same. Bulldozer can change that, but it needs to deliver.