RedJaron :
But is it an upgrade path you want to go down? For the casual user ( or the enthusiast who only needs a modest system, ) yes, it's a path that offers more power than you need for very little money. But considering what you get with an Ivy Bridge vs a Piledriver, I can't think of many tech savvy people who wouldn't want or need the extra power the current Intel generation gives.
FX-8120 or FX-6100. Disable one core per module, letting the remaining core utilize the entire module's resources. This is a roughly up to 25% performance increase at the same clock frequency just when you manually tell a program to only use one thread per module in the task manager or a specialize short-cut, something that pretty much anyone could do with a simple, sub-minute tutorial. This also has the added benefit of decreasing power consumption at the same time because you have half of the cores either idling or disabled, depending on whether or not they are set to be inaccessible or completely disabled.
This is a huge performance per core per watt increase and increases thermal headroom substantially. You could easily get such a CPU up to and possibly past 5GHz on affordable air cooling. In this scenario, that's enough to put up a good fight against overclocked LGA 1155 i5s. The CPU/NB frequency can also be overclocked significantly with a considerably high performance boost as a result because it controls, among other things, the frequency of the L3 cache which defaults to a mere 2.2GHz if it isn't changed.
Bulldozer can already can already put up an excellent fight against Sandy/Ivy Bridge if you know how to use it well. Piledriver CPUs would be a large improvement over Bulldozer in that even Trinity is already a considerable increase in performance over Bulldozer despite not even having L3 cache. The performance of Steamroller and its subsequent successors is not something that I'm aware of, but if they are improvements over their immediate predecessors as Piledriver is over Bulldozer, that would be an excellent upgrade path.
By the time that a Phenom II x4 with an overclock is no longer practical for a $500 machine, we'll be a good two or three years down the road and Ivy will be no better then than it is now, but AM3+'s last families will probably be around Ivy in performance per core even without the enhancements other than overclocking that I mentioned earlier in this post. Combine that with the enhancements and overclocking and I don't see any advantage in going LGA 1155. Now if we were talking Haswell versus AMD once it is out, then there might be a great argument in that, but not Ivy/Sandy Bridge versus AMD's future.
I consider myself a tech savvy person and I'd easily choose the future of AM3+ over the future of LGA 1155. Right now, I'd go Intel over AMD for top performance because even with those above-mentioned enhancements to compete in performance, it would get hot and suck a lot of power, although it would most certainly not be nearly as bad as overclocking Bulldozer CPUs without the enhancements.
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