Quote Originally Posted by informal View Post
Well the only issue with what xsecret said ,that I see, is that he confirms that Chinese(VRzone) leaked numbers are true or close to what he has seen under NDA. Mind you that those numbers show 8120 @ 3.1Ghz scoring lower than Deneb X4 in 3dmark06 CPU subtest ,for instance. IMO this is hard to believe since even on paper,those 4 FPUs inside Zambezi are much more powerfully than 4 Deneb FPUs. Similar goes for Cinebench,wprime etc. The design has to be seriously borked in order to perform worse than quad core Deneb at similar clock(8C Bulldozer vs QC Deneb).
High raw throughput for an FP unit is nice. But in order to use this power in real-world application, you need a frontend able to feed it correctly. That means massive code optimization and a good compiler, in best case. And keep in mind the horribly slow L1 Write-Through, probably added in order to remove a bottleneck in frequency scaling. Write-Through means your writing from the frontend to the L2 "through" the L1. So, seen from the frontend, the L1 write bandwidth is as "slow" as the L2 write bandwidth. The last µarch to use that horrible trick was Netburst, with high frequencies in mind. Bulldozer comes with a L1 WT too and that point only could explain many disappointments from a performances point of view.

Anyway, Macci speaks about a 5 GHz overclocking w/ air cooler. According to the roadmap, a 4.5 GHz CPU (turbo, but turbo is there in order to stay within TDP and we don't care about that in OC) planned in early 2012, so a 500 MHz overclocking doesn't seems so extreme. Is there any leaks related to power dissipation ?