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thing is though, at a design point of view Bulldozer quad-cores aren't meant to compete with traditional quad-cores. since from a pure design standpoint, each module is two integer cores containing 66.6% of the physical resources of a 'stars' based core and a clever shared FPU. now this combined with its caches takes up about 30.9 mm2 of die space, so four modules would take up around 122 mm2 of die space, the problem with the size of Bulldozer is the enormous amount of cache present on the chip, 8MB of L3 takes up considerable space which baffles me why they did it. so strictly speaking a four core Bulldozer should be getting compared to a dual-core standard design, that was always from day one the idea behind Bulldozer, divide and conquer. the poor single threaded performance (caused by that 66.6% of 'stars' core resources!) was supposed to be offset by a substantial increase in clock speed, the whole of the Bulldozer modular design philosophy relies entirely on how many threads can be thrown at the design at once, then it should be able to offset the IPC decrease and turn it into a increase in throughput.
yeah indeed, but even then people wonder whether the L3 is even needed at all on the chip? would love for them to remove it entirely and we'll find out, as it stands though its around the size of a Thuban die as far as I remember, which isn't as bad as people make it out to be, but considering the transition to 32NM should realistically be smaller.
the enormous problem is the way its being compared, the 'eight-core' 8150 should be compared more like four modules vs. four cores, which is the intention in the grand scheme of things, so in that respect I think its a decent first attempt and once they sort out the process it'll show its strengths. problem is nine times out of ten on here people are writing it off because it gets beaten in lightly threaded workloads, even by Phenom II but they always, always forget that was never the purpose of Bulldozer! lightly threaded it is behind the competition, multi-threaded it is competitive with the competition and heavily multi-threaded it starts to show its potential.
people have to start seeing Bulldozer for what it is (regardless of marketing) and that is 4 module, 8 thread processor, when compared to the 2600K for example which is 4 'core', 8 thread processor, that is how they should be compared, argued this point for ages about comparing them core vs. integer core and how it shouldn't be done!
