...and add more L2 caches instead. From what I see, the memory bandwidth benchmark of Phenoms is actually slower than K8. This is largely due to the high latency of L3 caches. I dont think any applications (games, encoding, HD play back....) benefit much from L3 cache other than enterprise applications. Seeing all those benchmarks where even a Q6600 pawn any of the Phenoms hands down, is so disappointing. Clock for clock, Phenom is ~13.5% slower, and i believe the slow memory bandwidth is the main culprit here. By removing the big L3 cache (which eats up die size) and add more L2 cache, i believe AMD will be still on game, but what we have here is a very disappointing processor which not only perform slow, but also also pricier and generate more TDP.