AMD strictly moderated (AMD)

[mas]

Indeed. Fwiw the uarch improvements to K8 were designed to make the K8 more robust in certain workload mixes, cure pathological situations and allow it to clock to 3+ GHz. OTOH the improvements done to Conroe encompassed these kind of fixes but also made the core much fatter and beefier at the same time. In its case I would say the uarch improvements are worth 2/3 of the gain with the cache/prefetching the other 1/3. You really have to take each case on its merits.