Part 6/12:
Compounding these issues was a critical design flop—Bulldozer, launched in 2011. AMD's first major architecture redesign since 2003, Bulldozer aimed to enhance efficiency by merging pairs of cores into shared resources, theoretically allowing more cores and better power management. However, in practice, this approach throttled performance per core and resulted in chips that underperformed against Intel’s offerings. The failure of Bulldozer was a significant blow, coinciding with AMD losing over a billion dollars a year by 2012, entrenching the urgency for a strategic overhaul.