As an AMD fan since the K6 alternative to Pentium, I found the Athlon and Athlon X2 days almost exhilarating. The Pentium 4 was hurting and AMD broke through with K8, not only the best desktop gamer of the time, but also at least competitive in other applications. Downside being the price climbed accordingly -- my X2 3600+ was a huge extravagance and yet still a step down in the Socket 939 lineup.
It would be great if the under development x86 architecture turns out fully competitive with i7 (single & multiple thread plus thermal), but I don't think that's necessary for a worthwhile FX upgrade. I'm guessing the single most important attribute is that it be scalable for both Puma+ SOC/APU and FX (plus, of course, pin compatibility with its sister "K12" ARM processor). Seems Keller's instruction to the team is to "take the best" from Bobcat, Puma, and SteamRoller/Excavator and expectation is a move from CMT ...
AMD Bulldozer architecture (page 1: Introduction) - BeHardware The Piledriver Architecture: Improving On Bulldozer - AMD FX-8350 Review: Does Piledriver Fix Bulldozer's Flaws? AnandTech Portal | AMD's Steamroller Detailed: 3rd Generation Bulldozer Core AMD Excavator Core May Bring Dramatic Performance Increases - X-bit labs
... to more traditional SMT.
Simultaneous multithreading - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Regarding CMT, the primary current problems (Kaveri) seem to be FPU inefficiency (hurts throughput), transistor leakage (hurts power consumption), Bulk Silicon Vs SHP (reduced clock speed), and first iteration (learning curve). A significantly more capable FPU with 20um and FIN-FET technology could make a substantial difference. From what I've read, AMD CMT accepts increasing multitasking load more gracefully than Intel SMT -- better preserves responsiveness. Would be interesting to further develop CMT, though limited resources may prevent that, and so to whatever degree it survives will depend on Keller and his team's evaluation. Interesting times!
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AMD Announces Ambidextrous Computing Roadmap | techPowerUp AMD to Introduce New High-Performance Micro-Architecture in 2015 – Report - X-bit labs)