Intel Corp (INTC)

[subzero]

"how does builldozer fit into the landscape of products from AMD and Intel, in kind of feature - function terms.

The simple answer - and most logical explanantion - is that AMD doesn't even know what the Bulldozer architecture is.

Why?
Because AMD has delayed Bulldozer for at least 2+ years from now - which indicates they have scrapped whatever architecture they were working on for the past 2 years. And they have to start all over again.

Why?
Because AMD has seen benchmarks from Dual Socket Nehalem - EP and Four Scoket Nehalem - EX - leaked to them by common customers of both AMD and Intel.

What AMD has seen is that the architecture for Bulldozer that they had been working on up until recently would be inferior to the Nehalem EP (Quad Core) and Nehalem - EX (Eight Core) that exist today (Nehalem EP) and exist in engineering samples (Nehalem EX Octal Core) today.

Thus, AMD has found itself in a familiar position - having to scrap all work on an architecture that will be obsolete before they introduce it - exactly liked the architecture that AMD was working on PRIOR to the Barcelona architecture.

At that time, AMD abandoned whatever that architecture was and cobbled together pieces of the existing (circa 2006) dual core Opteron and added what they thought was enough improvements to make Barcelona competitive and still get it architected, designed and built in time to catch up with Intel's approaching Penryn architecture.

That hurried project, Barcelona, failed miserably - slow, power hungry and BUGGY.

AMD is in the process of repeating history by scrambling to re-architect Bulldozer into something they PRAY will be competitive in the 2011 time frame and still have a chance to actually get it finished in the 2011 time frame.

Good luck, AMD.