She's hyping up Bulldozer saying it's somehow "advancing progress" in CPU developement because it has 8 cores.

I think it's doing nothing for us. It's all marketing hype. I want 8 real cores.

I don't particularly care how many cores a CPU has so long as they are high performance, not power hogs, don't run at blast furnace temperatures and are good value for money.

I am not sure how anyone can hype up Bulldozer.The performance speaks for itself.I think AMD should have created a desktop grade CPU rather than pushing a server side CPU amongst us.Bulldozer is first and foremost a server side cpu,also the ipc enhancement has been pretty stale for AMD for some time now.

Bulldozer is not being defended so much as the its future direction. We all have strong opinions of what AMD "should have done" but the reality is what they actually have done and what direction they may take it with. i remember Phenom as being particularly unimpressive but the "II" certainly addressed those issues.

The poster in question doesn't seem to get how Intel works and really doesn't seem to know much about their CPUs compared to what they know about AMD's architecture.

Phenom II was "only just" imo. They may have named it like intel named Nehalem, but it certainly didn't live up to that naming, it was flat out chasing Core 2 Quad. How much of the engineering talent that went into Phenom II still exists at AMD (not that that was much engineering talent compared to K8 or K7.............)

Ph II was good but unfortunately Nehalem Slaughtered it.Their CPU design is going downhill for a long time now.

Phenom II (and original Phenom) was breathing space to allow enough time for a proper new architecture that could compete to emerge. Well, a new architecture emerged, but it couldn't compete, hardly surprising when the engineers were apparently inspired by the P4's architecture, forgetting have that ended up playing out.

P4 architecture could have worked out. Intel said at the time that they didn't want to take the gamble after Prescott
(PressHot). They might have got a 10GHz CPU by now if they went that route; but they didn't. They had an architecture to fall back on that was far safer.

My whole point is that we will see improvements in FX architecture. Will it be "enough"?
-- enough for what? To beat Haswell? No. To be competitive in the midrange/low end and make money there? Maybe.

Don't worry by 2015 we will see products from AMD competing with IB

Maybe that is all that they need if they can price them competitively. They need to fix clockspeeds and leakage. Then go after IPC. They should be able to do it this year.