Aye, it seems to really depend on what you throw at it. It can be right up there with the Intel 2500K and 2600K, but in a lot of scenarios (lightly threaded applications, gaming for example) it falls short. If you look at single-thread performance at the "core" level it's actually slower than the preceeding Phenom II.
According to that article the problem is that these chips just don't make enough clocks. There's trouble at the manufacturing plants with the new 32nm process, resulting in them not clocking as high as AMD might have hoped. It's something that can be resolved over time; we might see the "real" performance of these with the refinements in next year's Piledriver, but by that time Intel will have come with something new as well.
I really hope AMD does well though. Market becomes a mess if Intel is given free reign.
I think Frapsing while gaming still counts as lightly-threaded. Does well enough on older multi-cores, though the performance impact really depends on the game.
