David Kanter's Bulldozer article has a interesting "philosophy" page that talks about how BD is quite the change in direction for AMD. It sounds like the chip is designed to hopefully make AMD have some edge in servers again. But it also sounds like there's not a lot of chance of it matching SB on per-core performance unless it can clock very well (which it is designed to do). We'll see but I'm thinking it will be a great CPU for highly parallel apps (servers and HPC), but not as exciting for most desktop apps/games.
Hopefully it will at least be clearly superior to Phenom II in all areas. It is quite the new design so almost anything could happen. I've seen screens of CPU-Z showing samples at 3.8 GHz though which does sound hopeful for a sample.
JF-AMD wrote:This is very true. Too many enthusiasts say that Intel's top part beats AMD's so AMD is doomed. Except that intel's top part is $1000 and few, if any people buy it.
I wouldn't be surprised if it costs Intel less to build their $1000 chips than it costs AMD to build their cheap PII X6s. Intel molds the market to their desires AFAICT, and frankly AMD may actually help them do it because if there's no AMD I think the govt may go after Intel over monopolistic issues. The only time Intel seemed to somewhat lose control over the x86 market was during the K8 days before Core 2, when we saw AMD pricing their Athlon 64 FX CPUs up around $1000 too.