The following Jenkinsfile snipplet ....

checkout([$class: 'PerforceScm',
  credential: 'mycredentials',
  poll: true,
  changelog: true,
  populate: [$class: 'AutoCleanImpl',
    delete: true,
    modtime: false,  
    parallel: [enable: false, minbytes: '1024', minfiles: '1', threads: '4'],
    pin: '',
    quiet: true,
    replace: true],  
  workspace: [$class: 'ManualWorkspaceImpl',
    charset: 'none',
    name: 'jenkins-${NODE_NAME}-${JOB_NAME}-${EXECUTOR_NUMBER}',
    pinHost: false,  
    spec: [allwrite: true,
      clobber: false,  
      compress: false,  
      line: 'LOCAL',
      locked: false,  
      modtime: false,  
      rmdir: false,  
      streamName: '',
      view: '//depot/path/... //jenkins-${NODE_NAME}-${JOB_NAME}-${EXECUTOR_NUMBER}/...'
    ]       
  ]       
])

.... will checkout code and remove any workspace files from the previous build.
However it will NOT remove any directories that were left from previous builds.
I have a maven/tycho build that reproducibly fails with this setup:
it has a local maven repository (in the workspace root). The files in this repository (.repository directory) will be removed when the p4-plugin syncs the files. For some reason (I actually blame the maven-tycho-plugin) it breaks when downloading and unpacking artifacts (P2-artifacts in my case) when the repository-directories already exist, but not the artifacts inside.

Certainly this is not a p4-plugin bug, but I'd really like to see the option to sync the workspace and have exactly the same result for both syncing for the first time and subsequent syncs.