I've heard this story before. I have nothing against x-bit passing this of as "news" since BD failure is a hot item now, but Cliff Maier mentioned this quite some time ago already.
So it's actually the other way around if I remember correctly. Cliff left before BD was anywhere near completion, but he said (in so many words) that BD will be a flop due to reliance on automated tools. 20% bigger, 20% slower.
Most people dismissed him as your average disgruntled employee, yadda yadda yadda.
Now that Bulldozer flopped epically, he now gets his much deserved vindication.
I seem to remember having an indepth discussion with CTho when this originally came out, where he was saying that current tools have shown that they are usually more efficient compared to hand designs, and are also usually more compact. He showed examples, and gave the reasoning (since there have been years upon years of designing circuitry, the tools are able to use multiple tricks found by people throughout that time to reduce size, latency, interference, and power.) Since he is the only actual chip designer I know, I took his word for it, and still don't think that this argument holds a lot of water.
If I can find the string of comments, I will link them here.
EDIT: I spent about an hour looking for the comments, and I really don't have anymore time to spend on that task (I shouldn't have spent that much time in the first place, but I got caught up in my task.) I remember the conversation, but I am starting to think that it may have been Hardball and not CTho who it was with. Regardless, most of Intel's designs have been automated for years, with some hand tweaking, and I would expect AMD to do something similar. Hell, Brazos was marketed as the first fully automated design, and it did extremely well for the size and power budget.