AM3(+) is an ancient dog of a platform that requires a lot of external third party chips for boards using the socket to be anything close to modern, the CPUs that are sold into it are generally not competitive in single-thread performance or in power consumption.
But there ARE niche cases where AM3+ / FX makes sense, for MT workloads, on a budget, and where ST performance doesn't matter so much.
For those people, platform improvements are welcome.
This thing needs to be put out of its misery ASAP with the AM4 platform and anybody objective (i.e. not trying to be "nice" to AMD because they want people to think of them as "objective") will most likely agree.
Objectively speaking, until Zen releases on AM4, then AM4 will be taking a back-seat to performance vis-a-via AM3+, simply because of available max core count on each platform.
Speaking of Bristol Ridge on AM4, will still be a dual-module / quad-core APU, like FM2/FM2+, as far as I am aware. The only way I could see completely retiring AM3+ at this point, is if there is a true quad-module / octo-core XV or Zen chip released for it. Which likely won't happen until some time until 2017.
So again, given AM3+'s use cases and longevity, platform improvements are IMHO welcome.
I was even thinking of ditching my G4400 SKL OCed to 4.4Ghz for a 1045T Thuban on AM3/AM3+, because of the lack of MT grunt from the dual-core SKL chip. (And a persistent software bug in my favorite browser, that once activated, seems to completely negate the performance advantage of the ST speed of the G4400 OC.)
No. I can't see people who already own x79 boards going out and buying new boards and there is zero reason to buy X79 + CPU new today. X79 was kind of an outdated chipset when it landed and it's only gotten worse over time.
I was speaking to the availability of cheap (under $100) 8C/16T SB Xeon chips available for this platform, which would make a really nice MT rig, if new mobos were available, and with updated platform features.