I've seen the throughput argument being made continuously for the past decade, including in academic papers where the Opteron's higher throughput has been shown

I've seen the throughput argument being made continuously for the past decade, including in academic papers where the Opteron's higher throughput has been shown to beat Xeons in HPC applications. Another interesting aspect is that in HPC applications, where floating point performance is more demanding, only about 1 in 7 operations is actually a floating point operation. The remaining 6 operations are there to move around data, including requests to push data down the cache memory hierarchy. That's one of the reasons why the performance of AMD's Bulldozer and Piledriver lines scaled practically linearly up to the core count in spite of each floating point unit being shared between a pair of CPU cores. Consequently, HPC research tends to be focused on strategies to minimize the amount of data being moved around, as well as minimizing cache misses, or to take advantage of technology with higher throughput, such as GPGPU. As AMD's Ryzen offer greater throughtput, performance also increases.