But lets lay the blame on GF for Llano anyway...what about Trinity? Was that GF's fault too? The 5800K compares pretty evenly vs 980 BE with two fairly major exceptions. First is it's a 125W Phenom vs 100W Trinity, and second is Trinity has the large graphic core. It should be obvious by this stage that GF's 32nm was in pretty decent shape, but that didn't save AMD when the market fell apart at the end of last year.
Trinity's not a bad chip at all, and I think that needs addressing despite the obvious digression So let's spin that around some and get it back on track.
The Llano delay was most certainly GloFo's fault. There are no ifs, ands, or buts about it - GloFo screwed up big time on 32nm and that process wasn't ready for silicon for an additional 6-12 months after GloFo claimed it was ready.
Trinity shouldn't be compared to Phenom II but rather Llano. The same 32nm process and AMD achieved some significantly higher clocks (and a longer pipeline) but improved performance drastically. The CPU performance was a bit higher - single-threaded went up by a decent amount whereas multi-threaded didn't due to the shared FPU and -20% tax. The GPU performance otoh went up quite a bit. The product was also released only a year after Llano. Technically, Llano was meant to be released early 2011, but due to GloFo providing a very poor 32nm node, AMD had to delay Llano by 6 months, and even then it was supply constrained until Q3. By then GloFo had most of the issues with their 32nm node ironed out, luckily (or unluckily?) just in time for Bulldozer. (which itself was delayed from the 45nm node. Whether that was a result of GloFo's 32nm node being in an awful state or the delay on the 45nm node, or AMD's production samples showing poor performance is up for conjecture. I'm of the belief that it was likely a mixture of all three)
The point is, yes, GloFo most certainly deserves some of the blame here. It's b/c of GloFo's delay on 28nm that AMD had to go to TSMC for Kabini/Temash. In fact, it's likely that the 28nm delay is a direct result of the difficulties GloFo had with 32nm. And though I do think part of AMD's woes lie directly at he feet of GloFo, but it was ultimately AMD's idiotic decisions that put them in this situation in the first place. Had AMD not signed a longterm WSA with GloFo, AMD could have ported some of their future chips to TSMC or Samsung after the fiasco that was 32nm at GloFo. Could either have provided enough capacity? Well, in a struggling PC market and AMD's currently underwhelming lineup, I reckon that wouldn't have been a problem.