AMD had two leapfrogging CPU design teams. Memory renaming was added by the team that did Zen2, presumably the Zen3 team couldn't import it in time for some reason.
Any writeups on why they chose this system, whether its still used today, etc? I'm completely unfamiliar with this style of management.
Dunno about writeups but I've worked in that system. Basically the product lifecycle is longer than one product generation. So you get to stay with it through the development, test/release, and maintenance phases, which are arranged to be 2 release cycles. It didn't seem paradoxical or anything. It just made sense.
It depends on having two CPU teams, though. There are not that many teams in the world that can design a high-performance microprocessor; I would assume that AMD has two and Apple has only one (which is why you got all these fillers with just larger and larger M1s in a trenchcoat, while the team was busy trying to make M3 happen).