Quote Originally Posted by Kano View Post
Maybe take a look at the 4 cores of bulldozer, those are combined of 2 integer units and 1 fpu. You have got 8 integer units and 4 fpus then. If you find benchmarks where bulldozer shines you can say that those definitely do not use many fpu commands. Bulldozer is definitely a fake 8 core,
It's not 2 interger units with 1 FP unit, it's 2 interger units with 2 128 bit FP units that can act together as 1 256 bit FP unit, the problem is that the compiler and schedulers need to be set up properly in order to take advantage of this fact.

Quote Originally Posted by Kano View Post
you have to select your software very well to get increased speed, the older Thurban (x6) had "real" cores. One big problem with all amd cpus is that they work pretty inefficient compared to intel ones. If you look at povray (1 core bench) or cinebench 1 core results then even very cheap intel cpus can beat amd's top models. And when you know that most apps are only using 1-2 cores then you know what cpus are faster if you don't compile all the day
Of course Intel beats out AMD at single threaded operations, however AMD beats out Intel at heavily threaded ones, this has been the status quo forever, this doesn't mean that AMD's is any less efficient. Also the point of the Bulldozer design is completely on multithreading and in the future heterogenous compute.

And simple fact is that if the application is old enough to be so lightly threaded you're not going to see the difference anyway because it doesn't require that much single threaded performance, however where you need it with multithreaded performance AMD will be faster.