The history of AMD's Bulldozer architecture is a painful one. The old management lead by Hector Jesus Ruiz and Dirk Meyer deliberately delayed the arrival of K10 "Barcelona" and got usurped by Intel's Core architecture. The mad rush to the original Bulldozer caused a lot of sacrifices in design and ultimately, lead AMD engineering team to cancel the architecture in 2008. Instead of creating a master-core, AMD's engineers envisioned a multi-step approach to increase the performance of its architecture. Bulldozer was the first generation part, introducing a flexible Floating Point Unit, support for AVX, XOP, FMA4 and so on. Piledriver was envisioned as the performance improvement, followed with Steamroller which would bring "greater parallelism" - in fact, it would improve the shortcomings of the original Bulldozer, and then we have Excavator, 4th generation design which should increase performance and fight off Haswell-EP/EX in 2014..



Link: VR Zone