Clock speeds between different types of core are not comparable. Individually, the i5's cores do more instructions per cycle than the AMD's cores (which is really more of a 4x2dual core thing than truly 8 cores) and the i5 has better memory bandwidth.
It's also built on a more advanced manufacturing process. That's why it takes less power and puts out quite a good bit less heat.
So each i5 core is more powerful. But, perhaps in terms of raw computing power, the 8x of AMD may actually be better than 4x of Intel. Yet we may still like the Intel CPU for gaming? That's because some workloads favor certain architectures:
In really highly threaded applications where each thread is a lighter workload the 8-core is likely work better. But in games having the more powerful cores help because you can't make everything parallel (most of the highly parallel stuff is done by the GPU anyway, GPUs are way better at parallel computing than CPUs too.) and getting tougher stuff done faster is important.
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Last edited by Rbstr; 2013-01-15 at 02:22 PM.
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