Overall everyone seems to agree that AMD has made big improvements to last year's underwhelming Bulldozer.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/fx-8350-vishera-review,3328.html
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/vishera_review
http://www.techspot.com/review/586-amd-fx-8350-fx-6300/
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/amd-fx-8350.html

AMD does better in multi-threaded apps, Intel still has the advantage in single-threaded performance. Overall I'm quite impressed.

I'm glad AMD is making improvements. The power usage is lower, which is something that really bothered me about the other CPUs after the Phenom II. I have a Phenom II X3 in my desktop and an A6-3400M in my laptop. I was disappointed for a while that I didn't manage to get a Phenom II X6 before they vanished. Now though at least AMD seems to be heading in the right direction, so when I have to replace either of these CPUs there will be more viable options out there.

Thanks for the link. I don't have the time to read it right now, but I should probably take a lot at it before further spreading my AMD-skepticism. ;)

In any case, it _would_ be good if AMD recovered from the Bulldozer fiasco. Intel needs competition - competition is good for innovation, and drops prices.

Definitely looks like AMD is heading in the right direction. As the IGP advantage slims down with Intel's improvements in GPU, AMD really needs to find a way to stay relevant. If they go under, which their falling stock price has suggested, the Intel/nVidia monopoly might not be too fun for consumers.

After the apparent disaster that was Bulldozer, in addition to Intel effectively catching AMD snoozing with the Core series, I've been really hoping that AMD will come back in a big way. If the word on the street from sites like Tom's Hardware and AnandTech is positive, then it's an important step for AMD. Unfortunately, it still looks like they have a lot of ground to recover if they want any hope of remaining relevant vs. Intel.

Good to hear. As long as there are viable alternatives to Intel I can avoid ever buying anything from that company.

another thing to note is very few reviews are out using windows 8. People are reporting up to 15% better performance for bulldozer with win8...

Interesting! It would make sense if Win8 is designed to emphasize multi-threading, something that AMD's Bulldozer/Piledriver focus on.

So sexy....must make love to it.

it's not just that win7 and below are not CMT aware so missuse modules (for example putting a thread on cores 1,2(module1) then 3,4(module2) rather than 1,3 2,4 which win8 does which allows turbo to kick in)