Hardware review sites are very good at distracting us and making us think that <i>absolute performance</i> is all that matters (hence your comment about &quot;blowing competition away&quot;). And, yes, Intel has the fastest processors. But what matters to most people is <i>performance per dollar</i>. And in fact AMD often beats Intel at this game, especially in the consumer market (sub-$300 range).<p>Example: I recently built a Linux video transcoding machine to reencode H.264 BluRay movies to smaller H.264 files [1]. A $110 
AMD FX-8300 is able to reencode an average BluRay movie around 47-50 fps, while you would need to spend more than twice that amount of money to match this performance with Intel (the performance of the FX-8300 at this tasks falls between a $200 Intel i5-4590 and a $250 Xeon E3-1231 v3).<p>[1] Using: avconv -i input.mkv -threads auto -s hd720 -c:v libx264 -c:a libmp3lame -sn -b:v 1400k -b:a 128k -ac 2 output.mkv