Jim Keller [1] is widely credited for a large amount of Zen's success. Interestingly he is now at Intel.
https://www.statesman.com/business/20160904/amid-challenges-...
Obviously, people have different ideas about what they mean when they say "Moore's law is/is not dead", but I appreciate Jim's point that even if the current innovation curves we've been riding are slowing down, there are other innovation curves that we can take advantage of, and that the combination these curves mean that there's still plenty of innovation and improvement to be made in processor design.
Of course, the question of whether the x86 architecture will be the foundation for that future improvement remains to be seen. ARM and RISC-V are both eating x86 from below, and the fact that both of the processor architectures allow for greater competition among processor implementations suggests to me that one (or both) may catch up with x86 at some point in the future.
That Sunny Cove architecture slide shows a massive increase in the number of execution units.
It may be that Intel's next architecture, combined with memory speed improvements, is competitive with AMD.
But AMD also isn't sitting still. AMD's contributions (from what I can tell) include:
* Core counts have blown past 6 cores / 12 threads
* CPU prices have just been cut by half
* PCIe lanes have blown way past 8
* ECC ram is being offered in consumer PCs
Apart from SiByte/Broadcom pretty much a greatest hits list of disruptive architectures over the last 20 years.
When Broadcom uses the term SOC, they mean "Switch on a Chip" to differentiate their single chip designs from older multi chip architectures.
SiByte was MIPS-based, more like an NPU than an (Broadcom term) SOC.
He moved to Intel during last transfer season