Bulldozer vz. Sandy Bridge

[lonerider]

I am not worried about overall statistics when it comes to how many defective chips are out there... my only question is about Performance of both CPUs (Sandy i5 vs. Bulldozer FX) on multiboxing several clients. I recently built two gaming rigs for a friend and for a brother... and a regular desktop for a co-worker. The two gaming rigs were 2500Ks and the regular desktop was a Sandy I3. That's because everyone in the industry knows Intels are a bit more dependable. But that is not my concern now, since this CPU/motherboard upgrade is going to be for me (obviously, I'm not concerned in troubleshooting my own rig). When it comes to my rig, I want a platform that will give me the most bang for the back (with a small budget, thanks to my wife). We all know that the i5 would beat the 8120/8150 in single and lightly threaded apps... but what about running multiple instances of a game (like WoW) and binding each instance to one core?

I try to stay brand-neutral, and would like to get a feel on real-world performance (not theorycrafting) on both chips with manually setting CPU affinity. I guess I'll find out for myself once the cpu/mobo arrives.

To note: I also built two identical servers (running Citrix XenServer) for a small client/outfit for their desktop virtualization project using just regular desktop motherboards paired up with PhenomII-X6 1100T CPUs. Let me tell you this, each "server" ran 10 virtual desktops without any hickups. 1100Ts are awesome for virtualization, so that's why you can't really dismiss AMD's CPUs even though they also showed inferior performance reviews against Intel CPUs on single/lightly threaded benchmarks.