Its pretty clear to me, and I'd think it is clear to most everyone else, that John was taking counsel (getting his info) from the same internal sources that were busy convincing executive management to funnel R&D money to them to create that which became Bulldozer in the first place.
Think about it. Who at AMD wasn't duped by the shysters who dreamed up, and pitched to have designed/built, bulldozer?
Those guys had everybody at AMD fooled, from the board of directors to the CEO to the marketing team to the fanboys. Bulldozer was going to take it to 11.
Its not like John Fruehe just made it (the hype) up, or that he took a marching order from on high to go out and lie to the masses. That's nonsensical, John has to make a paycheck every day for the rest of his life and he knew that back then.
There was no paycheck from AMD, short the kind they gave Hector Ruiz, that John could have been paid to make it worth his while to so thoroughly trash his reputation and credibility. This guy will walk in his own shadow for the rest of his professional career, it will dog him (just as Hector's dogs him) every time his name comes up in the industry.
And he knew this was at stake back when he was talking up bulldozer, which means the only reason he'd put so much of his personal reputation on the line was that he had been thoroughly convinced it was all real by the same engineers he kept referencing as his internal sources for the IPC gains and areal die-size tradeoffs for bulldozer's CMT.
It would take a fool to be so completely shortsighted of their own impending ruin as to take a measly salaried paycheck and proceed to take one for the team knowing they'd be found out as lying the moment bulldozer samples hit the hands of the reviewers. John was no fool, no more so than Dirk Meyer was for authorizing the bulldozer project, nor the board of directors for authorizing the billions spent on its development.
A lot of people got duped in that multi-year fiasco, John just happened to be the unlucky guy who was to become the face of the fiasco as far as we enthusiasts were concerned. And I feel for him, how do you dig out from that hole? How do you forgive the SOB's who set you up to take such a fall? At least Dirk got to walk away with the option of retiring comfortably for the rest of his life, John still has to work another 20+ yrs with this hanging over his head.