[aristidb]

The very article mentions at the bottom that AMD has its fair share of nasty bugs recently, too. If anything, I would expect AMD to spend even less effort on validation (because they are not flush with cash).

[philjohn]

Or, because they're not flush with cash, they go for a simpler to verify design.

Remember, a lot of the Zen arch was developed by Jim Keller, who is the brains behind the Athlon 64.

[matwood]

I loved my Athlon 64. IIRC, it ran hot as hell, but the price/performance was amazing.

[MulliMulli]

What bugs?

[aristidb]

The article spends 4 paragraphs on them. Just one example:

    Although AMD’s response in the forum was that these were isolated issues, phoronix was able to
    reproduce crashes by running a stress test that consists of compiling a number of open source
    programs. They report they were able to get 53 segfaults with one hour of attempted compilation.