I've never had problems with Intel (and I have with AMD) so I am almost certainly biased. That said, if [1] the best AMD can do in a performance test is half of

I've never had problems with Intel (and I have with AMD) so I am almost certainly biased. That said, if [1] the best AMD can do in a performance test is half of Intel (at any price), I would say AMD has a big problem and needs to improve badly. For normal users, unless you are doing video-processing or any equivalently CPU intensive work, pretty much anything will do these days and the low-cost, whatever-performance-will-do market is highly saturated. If you want to make money and stay in the game, you need to appeal to the big spenders and they want more power. [1] I hereby acknowledge that the test might be flawed or not representative for actual use.