Guys, remeber to use fresh or source-built Linux with BD, or you may actually see much lower performance than expected.
First, there is the Intel crippling compiler thing, they may claim whatever they want, but still it's most probably there, modified to a certain degree.
Second, and this is the most important thing, proprietary software adapts to hardware changes and changes versions very slowly. It may not yet contain the new AVX and vector instructions (especially the 256 bit float operations, AFAIU).
Third, they're proprietary, and they often cripple their software on purpose, just to make people buy more powerful hardware or upgrade to a newer version of the software for money. Thus, they may not include these new instructions either as in point 2.
Given all this, I highly recommend using BD only with Linux when it comes to heavy computational workloads, especially multithreaded, like scientific stuff or rendering. There's LuxRender, physical-based, fully open-source, and you can always get the code and build it with -march=amd-family-k11 (or how they call BD in GCC). Actually, this is the most right thing to do, rebuild the software with -march=native once you get a BD.
When I get one, I will build some 3d rendering code with and without AVX and 256-bit float instructions (if it's not the same thing, forgive my ignorance, haven't yet quite caught up with the latest instruction sets) and post the results, just out of curiosity.
But the main point is, don't you think that your software will magically run faster when you drop a BD in. You'll have to rebuild or update it, but rebuilding and using Open-Source software is the best way to go.
