Right now I think it would be best to moderate your expectations and be patient. You guys are getting really twisted up trying to justify your expectations. I don't think that level of emotional pressure on an unknown future is healthy. If you are right it fills you with a sense of self–righteousness that reality legitimized your expectations. And if you are wrong it can be depressing or even turn you into the dreaded anti-fan. There are examples of the latter here in our very own forums. Instead practice patience and try to see reality as it is, free from our preconceptions.

I want bulldozer to succeed as much as any of you guys. Partly because of nostalgia and partly because it would be the better outcome for the computer market. Those with a long memory will remember that I speculated favorably about bulldozer since the beginning, against some of the worst Intel trolls. But my speculations, hopes, and expectations can't change the reality of making a chip. The reality is that when the theory of making a chip turns in to the actual implementation of physically creating that chip things can go wrong at many stages of that process.

Quite a while ago (just after we learned BD has 2 ALU) I made a rough estimate. I figured that if early 8 core BD could attain 4.25GHz base clock then AMD and Intel would be near parity for regular workloads and AMD would have a serious advantage in high thread count workloads. Details about the pipeline, cache hierarchy, memory subsystem seemed to bear this theory out - AMD is aiming for high clocks to make up for any IPC deficit compared to SB/IB.

But then rumors of the release clocks started rolling in. 3.6GHz, WTF? Of course my estimates could have been way off, but then why the long pipeline, etc for clocks not any faster than current products? Something doesn't smell right. Then there was the rumor of FX-8170 at 4.2, then 3.9. And the rumor about the 4.2GHz 4 core part. The reality is that to make a high frequency product everything has to go right, the architecture and the process. What do you do as a company if your foundry (for example) can't meet your original design clocks? You release what you can and try to fix the process or tread water until a new better one can be implemented. No amount of me or you wishing that it can be fixed with a respin will actually fix it if the problem lies elsewhere (if there is a problem at all). So here I am closer to release and I am letting go of my emotional attachment to all the speculations and hopes - speculation is for fun and I'm not going to let it wreck my emotional state if reality doesn't want to cooperate.

As for all this arguing over what defines a core, it's garbage. You guys are arguing over a fuzzy term that is more useful to the marketing team then the engineering team. What matters is how the processor as a whole performs with various workloads, not the number of cores. Cores is just a term to plaster in big letters on the box to sell to people who are too clueless to do actual research before impulse buying it. Just like GHz was in the P4 days.