Dresdenboy
Golden Member
It would be a pretty massive task. AMD would loose all their efforts regarding design automation, HDL, etc. Also changes of the process characteristics would require new design paradigms to adapt to new market requirements. They surely will reuse existing ideas and logic (on a RTL level at least) if appropriate.Just to put it into perspective, that's about the performance leap from Nehalem to Haswell. In one generation. You really think that's feasible?
With the Core 2, we knew that it was at least in the realm of possibility that it might outperform the Athlon 64 X2, since the Pentium M and then Core 1 were already putting up a far better fight than the Netburst CPUs were. I don't doubt that AMD could produce a decent processor by pulling the old K10.5 core from Llano out of mothballs and splicing in the execution unit improvements and instruction sets from the Bulldozer+ line, but something competitive with Skylake (possibly even Cannonlake) in terms of IPC? That seems a pretty massive ask.
The Nehalem -> Haswell path is an evolutionary one. This is not comparable to Excavator -> Zen. It's likely more a change like Prescott -> Intel Core (or later Nehalem).