Wouldn't it be nice if AMD had released BD just for servers for a few generations to work out the kinks, and gave us a 32nm 8-core Phenom III in the mean time?
An 8-Core Thuban with 8mb of L3 and, say, 4mb of L2 (up from 6mb and 2mb, respectively) and clocked at 3.6GHz would be a far more desirable product than Bulldozer.
The 65nm to 45nm die-shrink of K10 yielded pretty good clock speed increases.
Athlon X2 7850 -> Phenom II X2 570 yielded a 25% increase in clock speed.
Phenom X3 8850 -> Phenom II X3 B77 yielded a 28% increase in clock speed.
Phenom X4 9950 -> Phenom II X4 980 yielded a 42.3% increase in clock speed.
The fact quad-core K10 scaled so much beyond dual/tri-core pretty much assures that clock speeds on Phenom II X2/X3 were simply not pushed due to lack of a market. Another 40% jump in clock speed may not be realistic for a 32nm die-shrink of K10, but something like 25% certainly would be.
That would put a quad-core at 4.6 GHz. Six-core at 4.1 Ghz. Those CPUs would be far better competition against SB than BD is.
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