But Integer is one of the reasons the Core series does so well in alot of apps compared to Phenom. Why would AMD not truly beef those units up? What is it their banking on?
They are beefing them up. They just aren't beefing them up by making them very wide (and thus being far more complicated to manage), because unlike Intel, AMD doesn't have more money than God.
Better handling of branches, better prefetching, a trace cache, and finally getting around to having a
a unified int scheduler aught to be able to do wonders for their int performance, especially in servers. Their prior/current CPUs have been 3 ALU/AGU, and not able to always utilize all three of any one, even if the code would allow for it. Only in the case where you would have several clock cycles in a row where all three ALUs could be used, and there was nothing for the AGU to do, would be significantly superior to having 2 ALUs and 1-2 AGUs on the side, and that's not the most common occurrence (having several clocks
in a row where any 3 int instructions can be executed is going to be rare enough, outside of SIMD extensions).
If only AMD had Intel or IBM's pot o' gold to work with...