Barcelona B2 stepping showing reduced memory bandwidth?

[Dainas]

I bet it's for keeping the tention in the competition

Haha, you're funny!

They prob slowed down the northbridge frequency to ensure that they could get to 2.5ghz far more often.

B2 is supposed to enable higher clocks. Maybe something needed to be sacrificed to get there?

Sounds spot on. AMD would not tweak things down unless they felt they needed too. If the performance core is good it will be a small pittance to sacrifice.