alt Hacker NewsFair, I had not delved into the details, but still they were not full cores and the marketing did not make a real distinction.
I 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 (preferably integer) workloads like 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 even though it was more expensive.
The Piledriver would win the consumer bang/buck mindset 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 (locked?) 4-c/8-t Intels at a lower price, but that ignored the costs of massive extra power draw(100+ W) over the Intel, the need for beefier more expensive coolers and power supplies, more expensive AMD motherboards with beefier MOSFET power delivery stages built to withstand the higher power draws of the Piledriver, so in the end the actual bang/buck gain of the AMD system wasn't remotely as big as people were making it out to be, they were just happy to get a "6-core" AMD cheaper than a 4-core Intel thinking more cores = more "better", same how having more mega-herz was also more "better" a decade before that.
The Team AMD VS Team Intel wars on forums on these topics were wild back then.