AMD's long-awaited Bulldozer processor finally hit the market this week, and the Web has been flooded with benchmark results. One thing is clear: this won't kill Intel's Sandy Bridge, as some were hoping. Indeed, in some tests, Bulldozer can't even keep up with its predecessor. The launch of the Phenom in 2007 was similarly underwhelming—it arrived late, broken, and slow—but AMD managed to turn things around with Phenom II to produce a viable competitor to many of Intel's processors.
AMD's future success will depend on the company's ability to make lemonade from the Bulldozer lemons. And its ability to do that will be governed by the Bulldozer architecture: is it fundamentally flawed, or are the performance issues merely teething trouble?