For some years, and especially during the last six months before the Bulldozer launch in 2011, AMD has continuously made various claims about its performance, always stressing that it will crush Sandy Bridge, due to having a double number of "cores".
Immediately after launch, all the AMD claims were proved to be shameless lies. There is absolutely no excuse for AMD. Intel had published accurate information about the performance of Sandy Bridge, one year in advance. Even without the advance publication, the performance of Sandy Bridge could have been easily extrapolated from the evolution of Penryn, Nehalem and Westmere.
The performance of Bulldozer was determined by design decisions taken by AMD at least 3 to 4 years before its launch. Therefore, during the last 6 months, when they have lied the most, they knew perfectly well that they were lying and it should have been obvious to them that this is futile, because the lies will be exposed by independent benchmarks immediately after launch.
For most operations, a so-called Bulldozer "module" (with 2 "cores") had exactly the same execution resources as a Sandy Bridge core, while for a few operations, like integer multiplication, a Bulldozer "module" had even less execution resources than a Sandy Bridge core.
The common FPU of 2 Bulldozer "cores" was more or less equivalent with the FPU of a single Sandy Bridge core.
The Bulldozer integer "cores" were stripped down in comparison with the cores of the previous AMD CPUs, e.g. a new "core" had 2/3 of the addition throughput and 1/2 of the multiplication throughput of an old core.
So 2 Bulldozer integer "cores" were together barely faster than one old AMD core, while a single Sandy Bridge core was faster than them, by having an equal addition throughput, but a double multiplication throughput.
Bulldozer could have been a decent CPU, if only AMD, instead of describing it as a 4-"module"/8-"core" CPU, would have described it as a 4-core/8-thread CPU, which matched Sandy Bridge, except that in Sandy Bridge the 2 threads of a core shared dynamically most execution resources, while in Bulldozer only a part of the execution resources were shared dynamically, e.g. the FPU, while the rest of the execution resources were allocated statically to the 2 threads of a core, which is less efficient.
Such a description would have set correctly the expectations of the users, and they would not have felt cheated.
I am pretty certain that the huge disappointment that has accompanied the Bulldozer launch has hurt much more the AMD sales than they might have gained from the buyers lured by the false advertising about the 8-core monster AMD CPUs, which should easily beat the puny 4-core Intel CPUs.