Quote Originally Posted by Opteron146 View Post
Fair comparision, but with a brand new architecture the important point is the 2nd or even 3rd generation. The first one is very often buggy and not well optimized. Intels very first S423 Pentium4 was crap, the Socket 478's Northwoods were quite good, but then Preshott was the end, because they could not control the power consumption, and the pipeline got ridiculously long.

I do not see these problems here, the only problem is low-IPC, and a still not well running process at GF. Both could be fixed in the next revision. Then you still have superiour clocks. One should not forget, that Llano's CPU part @32nm is neither running well. Only ~3GHz clock, with OC you can reach maybe 3.6, Bulldozer seems to reach easily 4.8Ghz, with 8cores... and it has AES, AVX, SSE4.1/4.2... IMO really the better option to have build Zambezi, especially if the next revisions will gain some IPC.
But brand new architectures isn't usually worse or equal to the old, compare K7 to K6, K8 to K7, Core i7 to Core 2, Core 2 to Core, the only example of this is the failed P4 architecture. See the pattern? And your comparison with Llano is unfair. It has low stock clocks because it has a full 400 shaders eating power, and at the same time it isn't meant to be high performance. And you can't compare overclocking either, Llanos bad overclocking abilities is due to lack of dividers and frequency locks. An unlocked Llano without graphics part would overclock much much better.