Quote Originally Posted by -Boris- View Post
Because we are not too fond of turd polishing! It’s a botched architecture, you can’t just give it 50%+ higher IPC in the near future, and you can’t expect clocks to fix this when they already is near the roof here. SB is capable of the same frequencies and is so on much lower power usage and with much higher IPC, despite half the core count! Intel has more than twice the performance per mm² at much lower power usage, you can’t simply fix that with a few revisions. Phenom II has higher performance per watt, twice(!) the performance per mm² (taking processes in to account) and higher IPC and is capable of almost the same- if not the same or higher - frequencies on the same process.
I am not going to say Bulldozer is great cause it isn't. Facts are it was designed with power efficiency in mind and something has gone terribly wrong with the architecture, and we won't know for sure if these problems can be resolved until we see Piledriver to be honest.

And clocks aren't "near the roof" - far from it. AMD have for the past two quarterly results said explicitly they aren't happy with 32nm performance at GlobalFoundries and have overall been very open about it. Bulldozer was designed with high frequencies which shows as it retails at 3,6 GHz base. Llano was aimed at >3,0 GHz and reached only 2,9 GHz at launch and lets not speak of the mobile models. There are no problems releasing a CPU with clocks above 4,0 GHz and good power efficiency as long as it was designed for it (IPC usually gets cut then) which was a design compromise AMD did.

The manufacturing process isn't good at all today, and AMD decided to launch a brand new architecture on an unproven manufacturing process (never done by AMD nor Intel ever before?). I will wait for Piledriver before I pass any judgment on the architecture as a whole. I don't expect it to rock anyones world, but it will most likely be better than K10 and Phenom II.