[btouellette]

The benchmarks for all these CPUs that my personal view point is based on are all out there. Anandtech was my favorite source for this at the time due to relatively detailed testing and a clear understanding of the implications of architecture decisions. The complete history of their contemporaneous reviews are still online and userbenchmark.com has independent data on these older CPUs as well although obviously with less control over potential mitigating factors.

AMD was struggling to release CPUs that were competitive against year old Intel Core 2 Duos which remained the status quo through their Bulldozer architecture. Things started turning around with Ryzen when a combination of architecture improvements and typical workloads taking more advantage of multicore flipped the script.

The bits about "true" multicore are also sketchy considering Bulldozer was using shared L2, fetch/decode, and floating point hardware on each module and calling a module two "cores" for marketing purposes.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/4955/the-bulldozer-review-amd...