You say it's too slow, but you have to consider that the i7 series are not made for gamers. And if you compare price/performance you'll see that AMD comes out better that way. You may call me cheap but I prefer not to spend too much money on my hardware. Rather have some money aside for some other stuff
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If you want to know, I own a Phenom II x4 965 that runs on 3,4 GHz.
Also the fact that AMD is focussing more on the mobile and laptop. With their Fusion-tech they will have a nice grip on that market for smart phones and laptops.
I haven't been paying much attention to the latest CPU's or GPU's so I dunno what's new for Intel, AMD or Nvidia.
I am noticing that they are busy releasing hexacores, which I think is too soon.
You have to consider that just now the developers are now supporting quadcores for their games.
While i7 might not be "made for gamers" it is faster in games that require cpu power. Now most of the graphics heavy games benefit little from more CPU horsepower, so in those cases it doesn't matter if you're using AMD or Intel CPU, as long as it's sufficiently fast, because the graphics card will be the bottleneck. But in games like GTAIV, CIV5, Total War series CPU plays a bigger part and in those games the Intel Core processors are clearly better than Phenoms. Sad but true, especially since I have a Phenom II 955.
AMD might be trying to get more mobile market share, but if you look at laptop sales Intel dominates it and AMD CPUs aren't really in favor in laptops, they suck more power and give less performance. AMDs strongest suit is desktop CPUs and the hexa-cores you mention, but as you say, there's not a lot of use for six cores at the moment because of lacking software threading. AMD's hope will be in Fusion and Bulldozer, but it remains to be seen how well they end up doing. It just looks like all Bulldozer is good for is well threaded applications, but 8 cores don't do a lot of good in games at the moment.
For Intel this chipset problem is probably more of an embarrassment. They've already paid billions in the past year or so to AMD and Nvidia and I think there was some other entity too I don't care to remember right now. Obviously they have a near monopoly on the x86 market and make billions in profit every quarter regardless of paying a few fines now and then.