You realise those benchmarks havent changed in over a year right. Gtx 280 with no AA, what believable gaming settings that is too.
yup, with enough resolution, extra AA, and a video card vastly underpowered relative to the CPU, I can make any game come to an equally slow crawl regardless of CPU
fact of the matter is:
1. if your video card is fast enough not to be a bottleneck (or you simply use graphics settings that won't be a bottleneck), an Hz for Hz Intel rig will be hands down faster, and this is before any clock rate Intel advantage we're likely to see through overclocking
*note how the Intel chips with a much lower clock rate (the 2.66GHz quads and 3.06GHz dual) are keeping up with the much higher clock rate AMD (3.3GHz sixcore and 3.5GHz quad) and that the comparably clocked Intel chips (the 2500K/2600K) are 30% faster...
2. if the game is CPU dependent enough in the first place (ie Star Craft 2, World of Warcraft, Civ V), the Intel rigs are going to, again, be clearly faster than AMD ones
This current Intel advantage is also going to be common place in many games that aren't easily or fairly benchmarked (because the tests aren't precisely reproducible), particularly online mulitplayer games with large numbers of PCs/NPCs running around on screen (this is primarily why a relatively very old and graphically underwhelming game like WoW can still be so very hardware demanding).
Black Ops is another excellent example:
Sure, the Phenom II X4 970 is "good enough" as it provides above 60fps average and minimum is acceptable at 52fps. But its a good 25-32% slower despite being 833MHz faster than the Intel CPUs, which if we overclock the Intel CPUs we start to get performance acceptable for a 3D display or baby-butt smooth and competitive advantages of a fast 2D 120Hz monitor:
3. AMD doesn't even have the budget gaming niche locked down:
the four fastest sub $200 CPUs (not including Microcenter type deals where you can get the i5 2500K for $180) are all Intel, the 4th fastest CPU on that list also being the 5th cheapest out of the dozen choices (they are ordered by price). AMD's fastest quad and fastest gaming CPU on the list often gets embarrassed by humble dualcore i3s
Don't get me wrong here, I'm in no way reveling in the fact that Intel is dominating so thoroughly (I might be if I had been smart enough to buy an i7 920 rig
two and a half years ago when socket 1366 first came out! ), I'm rooting as much as anyone for Bulldozer to be a success (I can only fantasize what the new architecture might be able to do for my heavily threaded workloads), I'm just trying to keep things in perspective here.
I dont see the point comparing power usage between a 45nm CPU vs a 32nm CPU
because if you're buying a CPU right now its actually very relevant?
Not that it truly matters because Intel still has the performance, watt, and performance/watt advantage even 45nm to 45nm, its just that because Intel has a year+ head start advantage in process technology we're in a period where we are seeing the pouring of even more salt into the wound, much like when Intel released 45nm Wolfdale and Yorkfield duals and quads
before AMD could release even their own underwhelming 65nm Phenom 1 line.