I'm not a cpu designer but I do however know a lot about the process of cpu design and manufacturing. It's my hobby. I love technology and innovation. I dislike "patches" and workarounds (all to an extend of course).

Anyway I'd like to share my 2Mhz.

IMO most posters forget one important fact. That is that noone knows how efficient a true quad core cpu is compared to a 2x dual core mcm solution.
Sure 30k is amazing and I also believe it was a trifire setup. But still it is not "impossible".

One must know the disadvantages AMD's K8 has over intel's Conroe. And then compare that to the K10. Most of Conroe's advantages are taken care of by the K10. One of K8's biggest problem is the "interchip bandwidth". The memory throughput is bottlenecked. That's why you don't see much efficient use of DDR2's bandwidth on K8's.

Almost every bottleneck has been taken care of. And remember we are talking about A Quad CPU Core, not a Quad Core CPU It's 1 Core with 4 CPU Units sharing 1 L3 Cache of 2MB. So who can tell what performance advantage you can get? It's probably not much in some benchmarks but it could make a difference in ohters. Also the memory controler seems to be clocked either higher or slower than the core it self.
That will also mean that the system memory could be able to run at default clock no matter the cpu clock. There are many more enhancements that could make the K10 perform well beyond expectations.

But to get the most of a K10 software must be recompiled. To make fully use of the FPU you don't have any choice anyway.