I'm not trying to pick on the article, I like it overall. I took an interest in the Anand article when I learned you could build a 64-core box for about $4000.

This is the article it's in response to http://www.anandtech.com/show/5057/the-bulldozer-aftermath-d... the crux of which is:

Some, including sources inside AMD, have blamed Global Foundries for not delivering higher clocked SKUs. Sure, the clock speed targets for Interlagos were probably closer to 3GHz instead of 2.3GHz. But that does not explain why the extra integer cores do not deliver. We were promised up to 50% higher performance thanks to the 33% extra cores, but we got 20% at the most.

So the real questions seem to be:

Is Interlagos' perfomance disappointing on pure-parallel benchmarks as well, or just those with a noticeable serial bottleneck?

If there is poor scalability, what is the cause?

and perhaps most importantly: Will my kind of workload actually benefit from Interlagos' more cores?

I think that probably what's happening is that even the pure parallel benchmarks are not scaling linearly relative to the previous generation of chips, the reason is a combination of architectural changes in the core itself and memory bus contention, and the target market for these chips is VPS hosts running hundreds of VM images.