But that's a waste of money that will never come back. It wont make the chip sell in any meaningful volume. And it cost quite a bit.
I'm not so sure ot this cost thing, especially if they really did release quad modules Steamroller and Excavator desings.
People who bought FXs till now would have bought them instead, the work itself was mostly done: the modules were already ported on 28nm, the most difficult part was to make twice that and interconnect them. L3 optional if it really helped.
I suspect the limitation either came from above "no more FX, we are focusing on something else!" or possibly AMD didn't have enough spare engineers/teams to work on another line, regardless of cost.
I vote for the last one myself, truth it could easily be a marketing thing...
Guess what in the end if Zen works and delivers twice Piledriver performance, hits IPC claims etc it would make far more better impressions than say against a possible quad/+ Excavator.
I mean everyone would be talking: hey AMD just did their Conroe thing and got a massive performance increase, far better power consumption etc etc.
Not that they will surpass Intel, yet if they really release just 6-8 cores they will also strike that psicological feeling of better (same way higher clocks sounds better on any CPUs, regardless of arch), the "moar" factor and probably push the competition to release mainstream six-cores in the end.
Because if the 8 core Zen goes against hex line well you have 6 cores at quad i7 or possibly less the price. Now add the "new games will support more cores" talk you hear left and right and many people might jump onto a cheap Zen, even if it has lower IPC and clocks than Kabylake.