Mitch Alsup says when he left AMD, Bulldozer was : performance *decrease* of 5% from the microarch-slimming, together with hoped-for 20-25% frequency increase from the pipeline-lengthening.

Even assuming *perfect* perf scaling with clock, that's 15-20% increase over Ph-II.

When I left, BD was supposed to be 20-25% faster frequency wise, and
loose a little architectural figure (5%-ish) of merit due to the
microarchitecture.
http://groups.google.de/group/comp.a...14f6049?hl=de#

So they are really counting on speed-racer to bring the performance increase.