The article links to a list of "The five greatest AMD CPUs". I've owned two and a half of these! Athlon XP 1800+, Ryzen 7 1700 (I had the 1800X which was just a higher bin of the same chip), and Ryzen 9 3950X.
That same article also says that extending x86 to 64 bits "wasn't hard", which I'm not so sure about. There are plenty of mistakes AMD could have made and cleanups they could have missed, but they handled it all quite well AFAICS.
Thanks for the numbers. I looked up some numbers too, and my laptop has a 74.5 Wh battery. Additionally, I'm using an 80% charge limit so ~60 Wh. Since I'm sure about the battery life in hours (as projected by powertop), system power must be 9 W or so. Now I also recall 11 W before some tuning.
That same article also says that extending x86 to 64 bits "wasn't hard", which I'm not so sure about. There are plenty of mistakes AMD could have made and cleanups they could have missed, but they handled it all quite well AFAICS.