Discussion What if hypothetically Bulldozer/FX never existed and AMD stuck with the K series architecture?

[shafe88]

An old article "Phenom vs FX" got me thinking, what if AMD never devloped Bulldozer/FX, and stuck with K series architecture to release Phenom iii series of processors based on a K11 architecture.
Just imagine if AMD had released a Phenom iii X8 based on a K11 architecture instead of a 8 core FX based on Bulldozer.

 

[Isokolon]

K10 already was developed out of the K8 base. Chances are this architecture has reached it's ceiling. Just as Intel abandoned the Pentium and later Netburst architecture for the Core architecture as it wasn't performant enough for modern tasks and couldn't be pushed further.
Developing a new architecture is not the cheapest and easiest thing to do so I guess AMD would have gone for K11 if they thought that would be a reasonable choice.

Also Bulldozer wasn't all bad really. kinda ahead of it's time and in the early days some of the blame has to also be directed at the OS for poor scheduling. Intel just had the overall better product with Sandy Bridge being an exceptional line (an i7-2700k still holds up fairly well today) which kinda killed it.
and Piledriver was a step in the wrong direction -- but in the end they just miscalculated the direction the industry would move and ended up with a subpar product that did well in multithreaded scenarios but couldn't beat K10 (in the beginning) and Sandy Bridge in single threaded applications. designing a new microarchitecture needs time so they had to stick with it.

a Phenom III most likely wouldn't have been the big game changer. the Phenom II had a hard time competing against Intel's CPUs already.