Everything that mentions GCN with HD7000 is listed as a rumour. Considering the recent spate of rumours surrounding AMD, I am going to err on the safe side and assume GCN won't be here until at least 2013.
If it sounds like I'm being harsh on AMD (or perhaps even being an Intel fanboy), let me say that I was just as harsh on Intel's P4 (on which I'm typing this post at work), and I see no reason why I should hold back on Bulldozer when it is just as callous with expectations.
Just saw Anandtech's review, which puts Bulldozer in a better light: at least Bulldozer seems to bump shoulders with i7-2600K in heavily threaded benchmarks (Cinebench, x264), and synthetic benchmarks (7-zip MIPS). Curiously Anandtech didn't run their real-world 7zip benchmark (in MB/s instead of MIPS) in this review, so we won't know what that gap in MIPS performance translates to in real-world performance.
Unfortunately, I still don't see Bulldozer as a value proposition, for a few reasons. Although the CPU itself is cheaper than an i7-2600K, the 9-series motherboards start at $95 for 970 chipset, and $150 for 990FX. The H67 series start at $50. Both are overpriced for their featureset, considering the H67 is really just a southbridge and the 9-series series is almost exactly the same as the 8-series, only with AM3+ support. The 9-series chief advantage is its 32X lanes of PCIe, which few will ever put to good use.
From benchmarks we've seen so far, Bulldozer would make a good small-scale compute processor for the price, especially coupled with a few GPUs to make use of those PCIe lanes. However, for general use a Sandy Bridge i5 still looks like a much better build for the money. Perhaps if Bulldozer prices drop to match the i5, and AMD releases cheaper version of the 9-series chipset ... but meanwhile, those looking for better value for money should just go with an X6 build.
