Fair, I had not delved into the details, but still they were not full cores and the marketing did not make a real distinction.
replyI had a pilledriver one, it was a perfectly good cpu, I would buy it again. If I remember back then it was the best overall performance per dollar, the alternatives if I remember correctly were i7-39.. and i7-38.. and were at best 50% more expensive for 10-15% more performance.
Depends what you were doing with it. The piledriver only beat the Intels in heavily multi threaded workloads like 3D rendering or media encoding which is why it was popular with media creator workstations on a budget, but for most consumer real world tasks at the time, like video games, Intel was way ahead in performance.
replyThe piledriver would win the bang/buck race back then because of the 6-core part was reasonably priced and unlocked for overclocking, so people would overclock them to beat the more expensive Intels at a lower price, but that ignored the pretty high power draw and the need for beefier more expensive coolers.