It looks like Bulldozer is a "speed racer" design that was intended to run at 4-5 GHz. It's hard to tell the cause from the outside, but either due to 32 nm fab problems or design problems they're shipping it at 3.6 GHz. Given the fates of NetBurst and POWER6, I cannot imagine why AMD chose such a design.

Another way to look at it is that the market will bear ~$1,000 pricing for Intel's flagship processors but <$300 for AMD's. That's sad. (I remember paying $700 for the first Athlon FX.)

I've heard that the main problem is that they don't really have the expertise and manpower anymore to do a full custom design, but are using a more ASIC style process - influenced by the ATI folks. Also, this is an all-new architecture and so you'd expect that it would be unpolished and untuned. Intel hasn't done anything as drastic as what AMD has done here since the introduction of the Pentium Pro. Well, there was the Atom but Bobcat (also an all new design) is able to beat that the same way that Intel is beating AMD at the high end.

In theory, this will let AMD mix and match components easily, and quickly synthesize new designs with the right mix of Bulldozer cores, Bobcat cores, GPU cores, memeory controllers, etc to meet market demand. I haven't seen any evidence that this is actually happening, though, or that its worth the price. By contrast, Intel has huge design teams that can afford to hand tune a range of designs to changing circumstances.

Its also true that though GF has a more tolerant set of design rules in its 32nm process, it pays for it in lower overall performance compared to Intel's process at the same node.

I'm not sure the high frequency design was a kiss of death. In terms of pipelining it doesn't seem any more aggressive than the Power7, which has been very successful. The Power7 benefits from 4-way SMT, though, and that probably helps hide the cache latency that is hurting Bulldozer so much.

EDIT: See example here: http://realworldtech.com/forums/index.cfm?action=detail&...

They put a bunch of effort into this cpu but in several cases it's actually slower than their older 6-core.

They have a whole new approach coming but that will take at least a year to appear.

Lately all AMD seems to be doing is helping keep Intel prices lower (I got this 4ghz i3 with motherboard for $100 after rebate, which is incredible compared to Intel pricing in the past).

AMD has lost their edge. They used to compete with low priced processors that were pretty much matched, within a few percent, with Intel's offerings. With their newest flagship Bulldozer processors retailing at 279.00 you can save yourself $60.00 and go with the a Intel i5-2500k and have nearly the same performance. The AMDs may do well in highly multithreaded scenarios, but their single core performance isn't stellar.

Yea, they compensate by having twice the cores with each pair sharing a floating-point units, which works differently than Intel's HT used in Sandy Bridge. Basically which will be better depends on the workload.

The equivalent price Intel chip gives more bang for the buck and improved lower power usage. See the performance section of the article.