Bulldozer vz. Sandy Bridge

[lonerider]

Bulldozer cores are not real cores. They are closer to being real cores than Intel virtual cores are, but they share some hardware between them. That means that they just can't perform as good as a single "real" core. Even AMD refers to each pair as module and is very careful about comparing them to independent cores.

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulldoz...oarchitecture)

"A module consists in a coupling of two conventional x86 out-of-order processing engines each of which is considered to be a core. The processing engines share the early pipeline stages (eg. L1i, fetch, decode), the FPUs, and the L2 cache with the rest of the module."

"difference between the two approaches is that Bulldozer provides dedicated schedulers and integer units for each thread, whereas in Intel's core all threads must compete for available execution resources."

I'll leave it up to you on how to understand what that means.

Price differences at the time of my purchase:
$310 - FX-8120 CPU + Gigabyte SLI mobo ($290 after rebate)
$360 - Intel 2500K i5 CPU + Gigabyte SLI mobo (no rebate)
$450 - Intel 2600K i7 CPU + Gigabyte SLI mobo (no rebate)

I'm not building a $1,000-$1,500 unit, I'm just upgrading my existing one and luckily, I already have some parts laying around (DDR3 memory, harddrives, etc)