That's not what I was hinting at. Bulldozer was slower than its predecessor Phenom in single-threaded tasks where shared FPU/cache shouldn't have a detrimental

That's not what I was hinting at. Bulldozer was slower than its predecessor Phenom in single-threaded tasks where shared FPU/cache shouldn't have a detrimental effect. IIRC AMD made a trade-off to focus more on the multi-thread performance at the cost of single-thread performance (so basically more slower cores). But then many tasks are largely single-threaded and at that time the parallelization efforts were still very young.