Quote Originally Posted by tifosi View Post
1) As per what percentage improvement could be seen... JF has already said that with 33% cores 50% performance gain at server workloads could be seen. This is the only information JF is willing to share and unless you hold Intel stock or work for them, i see no reason why'd you press so much for that information... which he already explained that he couldn't share owing to product being some time away from launch (i assume about a good 2 quarters or so...). Personally speaking AMD wouldn't want Intel to have information on an upcoming product, as it will give Intel an edge and possibly a chance to outmaneuver them. It works the same the when it comes to the opposite... The only time Intel leaked information (remember C2D) on an upcoming architecture was when AMD was kicking them around left right and center and in all segments of market... Now if Intel finds out stuff, they could possibly evolve a new pricing strategy (given their scale and market share its easier now) or something else, to counter a competitive product. Competitive BD is...

2) IPC is higher...

3) IPC compared to previous architectures of AMD is higher... he said as much... and many a times over...
to be fair, historically companies that hide information until days before launch tend to have problems with their product, especially the ones who have many delays. Even if BD does have a sizeable increase over k10.5, which it should, I honestly don't think it will be enough to compete with Sandy Bridge.

That preview by Intel was a red cape for AMD to charge at, and I'm willing to bet if they had a better product they would have released their own preview, challenging for the top spot. My guess is that BD will be a fine product, just still not has a powerful as Intel's in terms of pure performance. To me it seems it's more about power efficiency, as JF keeps mentioning 50% off 33% more cores. Well why not 100% off 33% more cores? That's because the thermal envelopes would just be too high not to mention the power draw would be astronomical considering they don't have a working 32nm process.

At least from my perspective, it seems to me that AMD is done challenging for the top enthusiast performance spot. They seem to have shifted onto a new direction, trying to offer the most performance per dollar, especially over the long run when you consider electricity bills. That's quite reasonable, as Intel has far more money spent on their fabrication process, and thus have denser, faster caches which seriously helps out on applications like Super Pi.