To put it simply, I think people expected a LOT more from BD, myself included.
Sandy Bridge and the newly introduced Ivy Bridge has great single threaded performance and good (2500K) to great (2600K) Multi-Threading performance.
With BD you have a massive trade-off in single/lightly threaded apps just to approach 2600K levels of MT performance. Its even slower than Phenon II in IPC!. I expected a 2 billion transistor budget chip to perform a bit better vs it's own companies 0.9 billion transistor chip. Given that it was a next gen design!.
Finally, just addressing the point of gaming, to an extent its true that most games are GPU bound, but there are still CPU bound games out there like SC2. Also there are enthusiasts are also the ones sprouting multi GPU setups, where CPU speed does make a tangible difference compared with single GPU setups.
If the FX-8150 were priced the same as the i5-2500K, it would be a better value unless you were primarily a single-threaded application user. It's a harder sell at its current pricing. For gaming, it would be a moot point since anyone using these chips is gaming at 1080p and is GPU-bound, not CPU-bound. As the prices align now, the FX-8150 is not a particularly compelling value, unless you primarily use heavily-multithreaded applications.
Yes, it costs less than the i7-2600K and either rivals or bests it in modern multi-threaded titles. Bulldozer clearly illustrates how a chip can absolutely dominate in one type of task (see AnandTech's 7-Zip benchmark) while downright stinking for another task (see any single-threaded application benchmark). Five years ago, everyone benefited from moving to a dual core from a single core. Today, not many people will benefit from moving from four to eight cores. "What are you going to do with your computer?" is now more important than ever in determining what CPU will suit you best.
Are there really so many enthusiasts here and elsewhere who are so myopic they fail to see the flagship Bulldozer SKU beating the flagship Core SKU in a few relevant, real world applications? Are there really so many failing to see that while Bulldozer did not wrest the performance crown from Intel, it finally brings some semblance of competition to the i5-2500 and i7-2600? Again, some people are going to benefit from Bulldozer over the high-end Core SKUs. But not everyone.
Finally, where are the reviews of the $165 FX-6100 vs. the $180 i5-2300? ...What about the $115 FX-4100 vs. the $125 i3-2100? First, you can actually overclock the AMD chips. You can't overclock the i5-2300 nor the i3-2100. Secondly, reviews have made it very clear that Turbo Core in the Bulldozer CPUs works really well - better than it did in the 6-core Thubans, and better than Intel's Turbo Boost. What effects does this have in typical real-world usage scenarios given the i5-2300's comparatively anemic and i3-2100's non-existent Turbo Boost? There are a lot more people who drop <$200 than >$200 on CPUs - and right now, do we have definitive knowledge of the specific, relevant comparisons I mentioned? Why would anyone dismiss an entire architecture when really all we know is how its high-end compares to the competition's high end?
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