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.