Is AMD's Steamroller CPU design the company's last roll of the dice?

AMD has lifted the lid on its upcoming Steamroller CPU architecture. Due out next year, it's designed to compensate for the shortcomings of AMD's existing Bulldozer PC processors.
For AMD, Steamroller must be one of if not the last roll of the dice in its mortal combat with Intel.
You might think it's a somewhat premature announcement, given that we're still waiting for Piledriver, the follow up to Bulldozer, to land as a performance laptop and desktop processor.
But if my experience with the Piledriver-based Trinity APU is anything to go by, it's not going to dramatically improve AMD's competitiveness.
Being good enough

Actually, you could have a separate debate regarding the relevance of the comparison between AMD and Intel processors. The important thing is having "good enough" performance. Not being better than an arbitrary performance target.
As it happens, I'm planning to have a look at just that very question in the next few weeks. But until then, let's keep up the pretence that performance supremacy matters. Will Steamroller deliver it?
Certainly some of the changes suggest AMD has directly targetted the single biggest problem with existing Bulldozer processors, namely per-core or single thread performance.
So much for multi-core

It's somewhat ironic in this age of alleged multi-threaded munificence that it was in fact old school single-threaded throughput that let Bulldozer down. But then mainstream PC processing has pretty much levelled off at four cores.
Anyway, the really big change with Steamroller is the switch to independent decode engines for each integer engine in a Bulldozer module. In some ways, that's AMD eating humble pie. After all, the whole point about Bulldozer was supposed to be about clever sharing of architectural components.