I'm with you Dimitriman .. I can't understand the logic they used to get where they are now. They knew ,back in 2008,with what they are dealing with from the other side. They could even make projections with what will intel come up come 2010/2011. With all this foreknowledge they produce chip that on paper has 33% more cores,but since each core is weaker,especially in SIMD workloads (which are crucial aspect of modern day CPU performance),it can't outperform the old design by more than 20%. Looking at highly MT scores,Thuban is just behind it in handbrake(video transcode) and cinebench(3d rendering)-and these 2 are supposed to be strongholds of Bulldozer design. As for ST performance,they talked about super prefetch and other things that supposed to offset the deeper pipeline and they talked about whole flexfp executing 256bit for single thread code etc. None of these things help Bulldozer outperform a 2007 core(K10) that got a very mild facelift in 2008/09 (in Deneb iteration). It's pretty disappointing.

Now there is this clock speed headroom which is a definite plus of the design,but users will run in the wall around 4.8Ghz on air. This is 17% faster than average Thuban OC so in best case you are just matching Thuban's "pure speed"(aka IPC) in apps like games (which won't support 8 threads anytime soon so core count advantage won't kick in) and poorly threaded workloads which are just the majority of desktop application types. Where you can actually use 8 cores/threads ,then this 4.8Ghz OC vs Thuban's 6C running at 4-4.1Ghz will probably be around 33% faster,but this is just in a few applications .