Quote Originally Posted by xdan View Post
I am not against BD CMT design, but without stronger IPC it's just useless.
Well phrase the sentence a bit less dramatic and you are right. Low IPC does not make your CPU useless, but it obviously hinders your applications as long as they use less than 8 threads. There's turbo, but it can probably only help a bit.

In the end, we have a brand new design. Nobody has done CMT before. Just because it's first version is not "da über CPU" doesn't make the whole approach "useless".
They've already have a 2nd and 3rd version in the queue so let's see what will happen with IPC.

The very first P4 (Williamete, Socket 423) was really useless. Clock was still low around ~1.5GHz, and a P3 was always faster, not to mentiond AMD's K7. The 2nd version Northwood (S428, later versions with Hyperthreading) was actually quite good, SSE2 was used more often, too, but then the 3rd generation was Prescott aka Preshott. That was then really the time to pull the plug.

So far in my opinion, BD is much better than the first P4. Let's see how the story will end