Well were there multiple leaked benchmarks that showed Bulldozer in a positive light back then? Specifically compared to $1000+ Intel HEDT parts?
True. But I believe the two benchmarks AMD showed is where zen had the best performance, which is probably why they showed them and not others.
CPC benchmark suggested that Zen was about 8pc behind BWE clock for clock. Which is impressive coming from BD, but none of the them showed single threaded IPC. We don't know if AMD has better SMT or not. but if they do have a better SMT, it means single thread performance is more than 15 pc behind SL/KL
at the very least. While its not bad, but it means to undo Intel at the very top, they, in order to draw parity with i7 7700k, will need to clock their 4c8t CPU more than 4.5 GHz
at the very least. If IPC is 20pc behind, than the clock has to be 4.8ghz. And soon it becomes unlikely that a zen core can clock at 4.8ghz out of the box.
AMD has claimed 40+pc IPC in single thread over excavator. PD/XV is roughly 75pc behind SL on average. Not sure what to take away from there.
Granted AMD don't need to take the performance crown to have a winning product, but it will probably be helpful to win some serious market share. Please consider that most people will just look at the benchmark that will show Intel is 10 pc ahead and so get Intel instead as most of them don't overclock.