It is never boring in the world of CPUs. Regardless of who's on top, plans for next generations tend to excite everybody in the eco-system… if you deliver, that is. AMD had a lot of tough times of late, and lost a lot of good people due to lack of proper management. In this article, we bring you a look into the architecture that everybody in the industry has been impatiently waiting for. But this time, AMD cannot afford to fail.

The Ex-Alpha engineering teams lead by Dirk Meyer that created K7 and K8 architecture messed everything up with Barcelona/Agena and the infamous TLB-bug [Translation-Lookaside Buffer]. Shanghai/Deneb cleaned a lot of things up and AMD is back being competitive again, but Intel is pushing hard: Intel is operating in tick-tock architectural mode, and so far - AMD isn't able to answer back. K10 and K10.5 were nothing else but improvements over the K8 architecture. Last time we saw a completely new architecture from AMD, the stock market thought that an online dog-food shop was worth half a billion US$, mainstream media was touting that the world is going to end with that horrible Y2K bug... Yes, quite a long time ago. But before we dig into Bulldozer's architecture, let's set the record clear, with a simple architectural comparison between AMD and Intel.