AMD strictly moderated (AMD)

[wbmw]

Re: Were there any other microarchitectural
changes made?

Yes, abundantly. K8 had major improvements in the SSE engine, major front end changes that allowed the decode engine to have higher throughput, cured many pathological cases in the execution pipeline with bad instruction mixes (and others that I can't recall). I believe K8's strong performance in games, for example, has a lot to do with the first two.