Because we care about desktop performance. Most of the desktop software today is single or dual threaded. Four threaded software is rarity and we haven't seen any application that can fully utilize all 4 cores yet.
About the "native" epithet, thats only a marketing which means nothing.
Depends on what is "very quickly". The cores on a K10 @ 2.4GHz or less are communicating slower than the cores of the different dies of the Core2 Quad MCM at same frequency.
Depends of what kind of SSE code. For some code it is true, for some it isn't. For example during the decode phase the 128bit SSE instructions on the K8 are being split(vector path code) in two 64bit and executed in 2 cycles. K10 doesn't split the 128bit SSE instructions and it is executing them in 1 cycle.
You would notice the same on every system, but it is more noticeable on a K8(regardless of the number of CPUs).
Sometimes yes, but sometimes it performs faster without NUMA. Depends of the OS and the code which is being processed.
The HT3 is useless on the desktop and it won't offer any performance benefit over HT2 or HT1.
The bandwidth on the AMD platforms scales with the number of sockets. So the single desktop CPU won't have more bandwidth than Barcelona(2 or more CPUs, ccNUMA). It will only have RAM with lower latency, which would boost its performance for sure. But how much, we can only speculate. Having two IMCs and a large L3 as a medium between the cores and the RAM leads me to a conclusion that it won't bring any dramatical performance improvements. 5% would be impressive.
I don't know who is the person, but I know that at higher frequency K10(and every CPU made up to date) doesn't scale better in performance. At certain frequencies(such are 1.6GHz, 2.4GHz and 3.2GHz) it will run the RAM at a little bit higher(5% to 10%) frequency, but it won't make any noticeable difference in performance. The same happens with the K8, but we don't see a 2.4GHz K8 offering any noticeable IPC advantage over a 2.3GHz.
This is nonsense. Barcelona doesn't scale better than linear, nor it scales linear.
http://img231.imageshack.us/img231/8483/scalingrg0.png
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets...spx?i=3092&p=6
Note, that this comparison is between the "bugged?" B1 and the new B2, so if you compare B2 to B2, the scaling would be even lower.
Also there was a guy(I don't remember who) from AMD's server division who officially said that K10 @2.5GHz would be around 15% faster than a 2GHz K10.
