Really? If what you say is true then I guess I might go with i5. Surely the price must drop somewhat though.
No, this isn't true. The Intel prices drop at the same rate as everything else, and when Bulldozer comes out, they will probably drop lower still, so you are talking a few months before their prices fall. Even if AMD don't compete with Intel's top end at that point, they need only bring out a CPU that is able to keep up with, or nearly keep up with, Sandy Bridge, price it lower, and force Intel to drop their prices, because otherwise every man and his dog will be going AMD, because of ample performance, but better price/performance.
This has happened time and time again, so I would put money on AMD doing something similar with their pricing this time.
I've made up my mind and I'm going with intel. I just can't go with AMD knowing that I'm paying the same but getting less performance. Thanks to everyone who contributed to this thread.
Let me put it to you like this:
Your screen has (I should imagine) a refresh rate of 60Hz. This means, up to 60FPS in games, there is a difference. Anything over 60FPS, and it is wasted. You may as well cap at 60 FPS and leave it be, you will use less resources, so save money on electricity, because even though your system is able to get say 120FPS, it makes not a blind bit of difference.
Now, take that analogy, and compare it to the CPU:
Load times will be held back by the hard drive.
Games will be held back by the graphics card or by the monitor's refresh rate
Everything else doesn't tax the CPU at all, so performance is identical.
the only time you have any real noticable performance difference is when you benchmark, or when you do 2D rendering, HD video editing, compress/decompress files or encode media files. In short, unless you specifically need the system for those purposes and you do those on a regular basis, you will notice the square root of naff all difference in performance. What has been said about AMD not being able to do anything, or about it being weaker is complete twoddle
well for video en and de-coding i think amd is faster sometimes, really there isn't even a decently noticeable difference
The Thuban CPU's (Phenom II x6) compete with the Nehalem i7 processors, but that is because of the two extra cores. Even so, it doesn't beat them by a large amount.
So, in short, no, AMD does not beat Intel unless you look at it from a price perspective. If you look at it from similar price points, AMD takes it, because the closest to the 1055T in terms of price is an i3-2120, which is much slower because of having a third of the number of cores.
In terms of similar processors, Intel destroys AMD. You may pay extra, but you are paying for the extra power, which is justifiable. You take a Phenom II 980 and compare it to an i5-2500 (both quad cores with 3.7GHz clock speeds, the Intel with Turbo Boost), the 2500 blows the AMD chip away