But.. who cares?
Remember back in the day, when having the fastest CPU actually meant something? When going with an Athlon meant you could get a couple more fps in games at real resolutions(or, more to the point, we were actually gaming at 1024x768 in those days).
Now its like... I don't really care that much. I mean, it is marginally useful for photo editing and stuff, but... it's not particularly exciting. I sometimes edit photos on my 1.86GHz Core 2 Duo. We're talking about a system with 1/8th the performance of 8-core bulldozer, and it still works fine, just not quite as smooth.
There has never been another time when a system could be 1/8th the speed of another and still be able to perform the same tasks, with such little sacrifice in "use" performance. The difference in the experience between having a 300MHz Pentium 3 and a 3GHz Pentium 4 is astronomical. For 90% of people, a Core 2 Duo with an SSD will feel faster than Bulldozer with a HDD, even if the Bulldozer scores 10 times higher in Handbrake.
Am I the only one that finds PC hardware to be less exciting now than it was 5 years ago? And the consoles have made the PC graphics world kinda boring as well.
To be honest Im actually pretty excited about the APUs.
I like the idea of price/power going down, and the level of performance possible to extract at low price/power points. I also like the idea of them pushing GPGPU with these units.
I get the giggles over being able to get a motherboard/cpu+gpu in one/heat sink for 80-99$.
Remember when PCs used to cost a fortune? and youd get like a 166mhz pentium? today a E-350 motherboard/APU combo for 80-99$ will even be enough to play some lowend gameing... say 1024x768 World of Warcraft or so, with fair graphics settings and have playable fps rates.
Adorable little silent pcs, barely longer than your Ram slot
But Im excited about the bulldozer too, mainly because I want to put another AMD cpu in my pc. AMD was missing something.. in the single thread performance.
But yeah.... back when 166mhz-200mhz pentiums where the fastest things out there, and MMX was the new shinny thing, the differnce between the slower cpu and even just the model over it, could play a big differnce in terms of precived performance. For gerneral pc use (just checking email, browseing the web, ect), most people today would probably hardly notice the differnce between a E-350 and a i5-2500.
The area Id be most likely to notice a differnce would be gameing, but lately most things seem to run pretty well because of consol ports. Topend CPU/GPU arnt really needed that badly (by me anyways).