The extra Decoder inside each Module by itself should be enough to gain at least a 10-15% increase, i would go as far as to to say the extra Decoder is by far the largest performance improvement from all of the changes in Steamroller Arch, i can understand the GPU Benchmarks since AMD has probably not released nor provided any Optimized Drivers for Kaveri, but the CPU benchmarks are just horrible if they are found to be true (i seriously doubt it), Steamroller main focus in CPU was to greatly improve IPC or Single Core performance, but now you`re suggesting that all the improvements AMD did to Steamroller in order to increase IPC are basically useless because as you claim "they are not driving performance", with this argument it would mean AMD are just clueless on what improves performance on their own Arch.
Different types of application have bottlenecks in different parts of the CPU. Taking your example, if the application's performance is not driven by the decoder module, then improvements to that area aren't going to lead to significant performance increases for that particular application.
Lets take games as an example: Do you really think the L1 cache is driving performance? No, the larger L2/L3 are more important. So improvements to the L1 aren't going to have significant effects to performance, even if the improvements to the L1 are quite large.
Combine that with a clockspeed decrease of 300MHz, and you could easily see why some applications would offer virtually the same performance, even if several parts of the CPU were improved up to 30%.
When I look at the improvements AMD made, I see improvements that will reduce some of the overhead to CMT, and that will make applications that scale across all the cores run better. For applications that don't scale as well, such as games, I really don't see much in the way of CPU performance increases. I'd suspect those apps are going to be driven by improvements to the iGPU, not CPU.
We know for a Fact that Piledriver is AT least 10-12% faster than Bulldozer in Single Core Exection and up to 20 Faster mostly in Multithreaded, AMD promised 20% more IPC by Ehnancing the Arch on Steamroller and another 10% out of pure higher Speed (30% target), take the 300Mhz less Speed compared to Richland and you still get the 20% more IPC with Kaveri, now how on earth is Richland overall faster than Kaveri in the Pudget Benchmarks?
"In some tasks". AMD's words, not mine. See my above point: If a particular part of the CPU is not driving performance for a particular app, that app should not expect to see any performance increases by increasing the performance of that part of the CPU.
For example: Say AMD made the cost overhead of CMT 5%, rather then the 20% PD has. So you'd say "15% more IPC", and thus, 15% more performance. But for tasks that never use CMT [one core per module being utilized], this 15% performance increase to CMT has no performance impact on that task. Combine that with a clock decrease, and you'd actually expect performance to drop due to lower clocks and no change to IPC.
Lets take your Best Case scenario of up to 10-15% more performance like you previously predicted several pages back, your predictions fell too generous compared to Pudget Benchmarks it would mean Kaveri is about 10% Slower than Richland, there for AMD is lying with their 20% more IPC compared to Richland using bad faith and false advertising for a product they may know it will fail, then inflated the price of 175USD compared to Richland 140USD, then to make all this short it means AMD wants to rip all of us with an inferior and more expensive Product.
Remember the BD launch? When the PII X4 965 BE was beating the FX-4100 head to head in the majority of benchmarks? Its happened before, just two years ago.
I don't think it will be that bad. There aren't many pure single-threaded applications, so the number of apps that lose performance is going to be vanishingly small. Also remember that games are driven more by GPU performance, and its possible driver side issues on the GPU side could be understating the results. Simply one data set, and we'll see where the others line up.
But now seriously, we have no reason to trust Pudget or the hand behind them, seeing as how small they are, they would have no issues getting rid of AMD products and having a nice Pay Check from Intel, they have nothing to lose from backstabbing AMD in the back.
And...we're back to conspiracy theories. Rather then try and explain the results [poor CPU design, shoddy drivers, issues with the OS], we fall back to bias instead. And people wonder why politics in this country is so bad right now...
Even if it is 10% best case scenario compared to Richland it will still be faster than my PhenomII 980 at Default Clock, i get a nice GPU to the levels of the HD5770 that will boost like crazy using MANTLE and HSA in the future and i will also get a Key for Battleshit4 on Origin bundled with my APU, which i can sell easily for 30-40 Bucks... not too bad at the end of the day.
Notice I've never been one of the people claiming that a PII CPU would beat Kaveri? That's just sad people are still claiming as such. For BD, ok, but that hasn't been true since PD came out. As for Mantle, I've made my opinions on the API very clear by now.