I agree Elipson,

I guess the factors that seperate the 2 are:

A. People are of the belief that K10 has never been 'all there' , I tend to agree in some areas.. memory performance is lacking, performance is a little below expectations - A lot below in some cases where one would expect much more.. It's the areas were K10 barely outperforms K8 that makes it lose to Core on average.

Did the rush to get K10 out there leave some apsects of the design not functioning as they should be?

B. AMD need the performance boost.


Factors working against any large IPC gains are:

A. Just looking at the die shots, anything visable on a core level is identical.. any uarch enhancments there would have to be minor - stands to reason anyway, no one does a meaningfull overall of an arch when changing process node - old news

B. benchmarks we've seen so far show 7-15% max.

Personally A realistic guess would be 10% across the board, but next to nothing in some areas. and 15%+ in rare cases, like what we saw with Pov-Ray - a benchmark that was a sore spot and still will lag behind Core.

Its important they squeezed what they could out of it for Deneb - especially at 3Ghz plus. Lets not forget a 5% IPC boost is the equivilent of a whole 200Mhz speed bin at these frequencies.. and lets face it, no one's going over the high 3's (Ghz) with these sort of architectures any time soon.

Not that it really matters long term, Hyperthreading and any other means of increasing multi-threaded performance is all either CPU company will care about from now on. Lets face it, If Deneb was 15% slower clock/clock than i7 at single threaded (as it most likely will be) but had 4 extra cores, it would still be the winner.

Deneb's lack of SMT technology is now more of an issue than lack of IPC. Now if only they had a lare enough die size and power advantage to sneak on a couple of extra phy cores