Here is an interview with Macci And John Taylor at cebit11. Judging by their tone in the interview,to me it looks like AMD may price FX parts aggressively against intel SB and Gulftown parts even if FX performs somewhat better. Folks need to remember that in client space more cores don't have a proportional impact in performance numbers as in server space-much less impact in average sum of workloads as can be seen
here. SB 2600K has
~8% higher IPC,
3/5% higher clock(def/Turbo) and
50% less cores and is only around 4.7% slower than 980x. It is also more than 3x cheaper than 980x. Which is a better
value? SB of course,unless you do some insanely parallel workloads on your PC when 980x is much faster. Which is a
faster chip? 980x of course,
but due to nature of workloads SB hold very well and even outperforms 980x in many applications!
Same will go for FX BD parts(relative to 980x).Notice what Mr Taylor said in the interview @ 2:18 and onwards : " BD is designed to offer 30-50% better performance in the same TDP and roughly the same die area as AMD's previous designs". This probably goes for single and MT workloads,respectably. So for AMD it's important that they hit 40+% range of better performance Vs Thuban.Why? Well,if you look carefully at the chart I linked above,you will see that AMD precisely needs around 34% better performance overall in order
to match 980x in desktop workloads. They need 28% overall better performance to match SB 2600K. If they hit north of 40% range,they will be combating and maybe even beating 990x Gulftown part and be very close to SB 6 core products. All this within 125W TDP range. They can push for 140W "XE" part and go for 5% more performance (from 3.5Ghz to 3.7-3.8Ghz?) and have a "halo" product,but this depends on their ability to hit these speeds and their marketing department.