> Yeah, and you have to consider what you're doing on a day-to-day basis.
>
> Even if you're a MAME developer, you're probably going to see more utility on the
> Intel side considering you'd still be touching higher end drivers from time to time
> and the improved compile time isn't likely to be that much of an improvement compared
> to execution speed. A bit hard to describe well, but I think you get the idea.
For my purposes, the vast majority of the tasks that I do on a daily basis is not significantly affected by CPU performance; most modern CPUs are indistinguishable when it comes to things like surfing the web, playing movies, running normal applications, etc.
The one really CPU intensive activity that I do normally is to compile, and 6 cores is just unbeatable there. I have heard that video encoding and some other activities are similarly affected.
Running emulators is definitely not something that is helped by more cores, but then again, only a handful of the most difficult-to-emulate games don't already run at full speed on even modest processors.
I'm curious to know what applications you use regularly that need very high per-core IPC, and for which the 30% better single core IPC of a Sandy Bridge vs. Phenom II is perceptible? Honestly really just curious here; I have no affinity for either Intel or AMD (whatever does the job best), but in my experience I can't tell a difference between processors except when the extra cores come into play, and I'm wondering what other people are doing that brings them to a different conclusion than the one I draw.
Oh I should mention, and hopefully not to open another huge can of worms, but system and application start-up time is another big one for me, which is why I only buy SSDs now and will never buy a spinning disc hard drive again.
My home system (built in October 2010 using some pretty sweet pre-Xmas-season deals) is an AMD Phenom II x6 1075T w/4 GB of DDR3 1600 Mhz CAS7 memory (I run Linux with an efficient window manager and 4 GB is way way more than enough for my needs, others with more heavyweight desktop environments need more) and an 80 GB Intel SSD. I honestly can't think of anything I do on that system that I feel needs more power, except maybe emulating some of the harder-to-emulate games, but I don't even do that regularly, as I don't really care much about those games.
My recently purchased laptop with a Sandy Bridge (i7-2630qm) processor disappointed me a little; I thought that because it was Sandy Bridge that it would compare very favorably to the Phenom II, but in fact it's about 1/2 as fast at compiling MAME as the Phenom II. I thought that 4 Intel Sandy Bridge cores at 2 Ghz might be close to the performance of 6 Phenom II cores at 3 Ghz but it didn't turn out that way. Maybe because the Sandy Bridge is a mobile part?
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