An 8 core FX that is 40% faster than the current top of the line FX 8 core @ a good price point will be very interesting indeed. AMD have been good at the multi-core stuff for a while but suffered because the single core performance was lacking, 40% though per core and that sounds tasty. I don't think single core performance will be as important either once Windows 10 and even DX12 is maturing. In the near future you could have an 8 core AMD FX with 8 HT cores with a R9 with 1gb of stacked vram, ya new 390X and ya old 290X all working together on one motherboard. So 16 cores and 3 different GFX GPU's and all of their Vram combined.

IPC is a theoretical number that doesn't mean a thing! Kaveri and Excavator chips have horrific cache latencies and no L3 cache. Comparing those chips to the upcoming Zen based chips with inclusive cache system, SMT and 8MB of L3 cache is not practical in any sense.

They show it over Excavator. Even steamroller is around 20~25% behind Intel's Core i5 in IPC average. Excavator should average above steamroller like 5~10%. Worst case: 0.75 *1.05 *1.4 = 1.1025 ~ 10% above intel's Core i5 Best case 0.8 *1.1 *1.4 = 1.232 ~ 23% Above intel's Core i5

Edit: I think there may no longer be space for i3 chips. Not that I liked them ever. I advised anyone interested against them. And one person which did not listen (budget reasons) is not very happy with it.

Are you basing these best/worst case scenarios on a quad or octa core? Because as a quad core, I'd say a 10% improvement is substantial for AMD. Hell, even 5% would be a good sign. I think i3 in desktops is pointless, but, I personally deem i3 to be the most practical "average user" laptop CPU. Most mobile intel CPUs are dual cores with HT and heavily underclocked, including some i7 models. A lot of what you're paying for when you get an i5 or an i7 in a mobile device are instruction sets you can't really take advantage of, a better GPU (which doesn't matter if you're not gaming or if you don't have a discrete GPU), and bigger caches. The i3 has a very reasonable cache size and its GPU can play HD video just fine, so I personally think it makes a great laptop CPU.

For AMD 5-10% is a good rise, but to stay in the market that 5-10% is nothing. Also i3's are pretty common in the business sector. Lower cost for value performance and usage, not bad at all.

I meant 5-10% over i5. And yeah, I'm sure i3's are common for businesses. Doesn't mean it was the best choice (if it was a desktop).

Even so, they still need higher. Phenom 2 managed to in a good number of tests score higher or the same as Core 2 duo and Core 2 quad, but it came out so much later and price was not a big difference from the Core 2 series. For their cost, power consumption, and performance for office apps i3's hit right on the mark for business solutions.

Up to 40% faster? Are they comparing this to Vishera?

2016 will be the year for upgrade, I just hope they will solve all relevant problems of current AMD platform (via hardware), and I would not be forced to go with Intel CPU's.

Based on the slide, it should be 40% over Excavator.