AMD "Piledriver" refresh of Zambezi - info, speculations, test, fans

[-Boris-]

I never argue about ipc even before Zambezi being announced.
When you go over the history you'll find something similar to nowaday situation. K6 have 10% higher IPC than K7, netburst is terrible, and now bulldozer is the same. Reanson why they developed a lower IPC model is because the frequency is bottlenecked by architecture. These design always not only need tweak but more important is the process node, lately CPU bottlenecked below 4Ghz and now bulldozer makes a breakthrough.
Bulldozer = K7, and it would be another K8 when everything is OK, since then don't be surprise to see a CPU that stock at 6Ghz+.

Wrong, K7 had much higher IPC than K6, K6-III was far behind P2 overall (not integer), and P3 was behind K7. And the frequency is not bottlenecked by architecture, all architectures have a hard time over 4GHz. So it's stupid to sacrifice lots of IPC and die size to squeeze a few hundred MHz more from the chip at these frequencies, every 100Mhz over 4GHz has a high price, AMD decided to pay up. I can't imagine Intels factories being capable of producing BD at competitive frequencies (5-7GHz with less power consumption). The problem is in the design, they decided to pay a high price to get some extra frequency, just the thing that killed Prescott.

No architecture with lower IPC than its predecessor has been successful. All the really successful architectures has had large gains in IPC, like Core i7, Core 2, Athlon 64, K7 and Pentium Pro.