Bulldozer's failure was really one of market positioning. It would have been much better received if the CMT modules had been presented as a single, dual-threaded core, positioned against an Intel HTed core, rather than as two separate cores.
While I generally agree that CMT threads are not a real "core" (and has never been presented as such by any other company that has explored CMT), the real problem with Bulldozer was a frequency-optimized, deeply pipelined design. AMD literally repeated the exact mistake that Intel did with Netburst. It would never have been good no matter how you positioned it.
