[citation][nom]childofthekorn[/nom]The only 2 things wrong with the FX chips are IPC latency, Windows Scheduler and wattage. However, the latter doesn't seem to be a huge issue unless your going for overclocking. Turning off Core Parking seems to alleviate some scheduling issues and allow the cores to remain active seeing that windows does not know the different between Hyperthreading and modulated cores. (please correct me if I'm wrong)Personally I'm waiting for steamroller seeing that its the last reported CPU from AMD to use AM3+.[/citation]
IPC latency? Were you drinking when you made that up? It makes no sense.
They basically castrated the integer units for the Bulldozer and Piledriver, and then added another one to make a pair. Consequently, the only way to get good integer throughput is to use two threads per core, or you just have a lousy processor. But, of course, the decoder can't keep up with two threads at the same time, so basically you have this crummy processor that performs worse at everything compared to the Intel processors.
On top of that, AMD still hasn't learned how to make a cache. They have a puny 16K L1, but it's still slow, and makes the processor much more dependent on the L2 cache. The L2 cache is catastrophically slow, and is only exceeded in ineptness by their L3 cache implementation.
In short, AMD's Bulldozer/Piledriver chips suck donkey balls.
So, if you meant their cache latency is killing the processors, and exacerbating already poor IPC caused by castrating the integer unit, I'd agree.
It's a remarkably poor implementation, being quite large, very slow, and consuming massive amounts of power. It took a lot of engineering talent to make a modern processor that bad. Piledriver helped, but the basic design and slow cache limit this lousy processor severely.
Steamroller could fix a lot of sins with a better decoder, restoring the ALU in each integer unit, and making a cache system that works. The latter of which is nearly impossible, since AMD has no idea how to implement an efficient cache, but maybe with Jim Keller there's hope. I'm pretty sure they'll improve the first two, but if the cache continues to blow, it's going to severely limit the performance of the processor. I'd settle for even a moderate improvement, which is possible since the BD/PD has significantly lower performance than the Thuban had. Just get us back to Thuban, and it will help a lot.