AMD strictly moderated (AMD)

[mas]

It does not work like that. It either pays off bigtime, and there are many benches where K8 is > 20-30% better than K7, or not at all due to the work being compute/cache/bandwidth rather than latency limited. It just so happens that the former type of gain predominates otherwise AMD would be bankrupt now if it was relying on K7 type performance .