>Instead of discrete, fully independent cores, AMD grouped processing units into "Modules" where each module contained two integer execution units, but they had to share critical resources like one FPU, the instruction fetch/decode pipeline, and the L2 cache so when both "cores" inside a module were heavily taxed especially with math or physics-heavy calculations (like in videogames), they choked fighting over shared hardware.
They did just fine in parallel workloads, so I think this is not accurate. The design scaled just fine. The problem was that each core was weak.
>They did just fine in parallel workloads, so I think this is not accurate
Depends how you define "doing just fine in parallel workloads". The contemporary competition from Intel that was 4-core + SMT was beating AMD's 8-core FX CPUs in most real-world tasks and benchmarks at the time. The 8-core AMD broke even and rarely won only in >4-thread strictly integer benchmarks and some >4-thread media encoding tasks/benchmarks. So if you wanted a prosumer media encoding workstation a budget then yeah, the AMD was better, but for most real world task, it really wasn't.
>The design scaled just fine. The problem was that each core was weak.
Can you elaborate and be more exact? What you wrote is technically vague and doesn't mean anything in technical dissection/terms.