(03-17-2014, 05:58 AM)KazumiZorah Wrote: It's cheaper for a reason, why would 8 cores @ 4.0 be cheaper than 4 cores @ 3.4?
The short answer to this is "marketing" and "research". AMD presents an excellent price/value in some of their newer product lines for general computing. Their IPC is poor as a result of inferior R&D compared to Intel. Some of it is also the fact that it is Intel and someone has to pay for all of that great marketing material. Right now you can get an AMD CPU that is about 1/2 as performant (generally speaking) as what Intel offers. It will come at about 1/3 of the price of that Intel chip, so in a sense, that makes it a great bargain.
In practical terms, IPC is much more important for Dolphin than raw clock speed. If you're doing any kind of intensive work like video encoding, the i5-4670 tears the doors off anything AMD offers. I will also say anecdotally that it is a hell of a lot faster than any AMD CPU I've ever used for general computing. If you have the money to spend and want your computer to go fast, AMD is just not your ticket right now for CPUs.