What EXACTLY makes the i3 3220 superior to the phenom ii x4 965?

Intel gets more done per clock cycle than AMD. (At the moment anyway)

It's called IPC or "instructions per clock". Intel has an advantage in this area and it means AMD chips have to run at faster clocks to get the same amount of work done in the same amountof time.

HT gives Intel chip only 20-30% more performance in heavily threaded code or multitasking situations while having extra cores yields closer to 100% if the code can scale that high.

The reason i3 and even the SB/IB Pentiums beat most higher-clocked higher-cored AMD chips in gaming is because most games cannot make much effective use of more than one core so games tend to heavily favor high single/dual-core IPC.

Once you throw multitasking or heavily threaded applications/games in, AMD has a fighting chance again. But heavily threaded games are currently very rare and will likely remain exceptions for the foreseeable future.

Ah, okay. Would you consider recording a game with fraps to be "heavily threaded"?

If done in software, the encoding can easily keep a core or two busy.

On the other hand, it should only be a matter of time until applications like FRAPS integrate Intel QuickSync support. Once they do, encoding becomes trivial, almost entirely offloaded to the HD2500/4000 IGP with 2-3X the performance of today's best software encoders.

Check this link for some analysis that may help with your original question:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/fx-4170-core-i3-322...

Ummmm most games use 2-3 cores actually and newer games can use 4+ cores. I have BF3 is one that can use more then 4 as it shows improvement with an i7 over an i5.

They may make SOME use of extra cores but not efficient or effective use of extra cores. How many of those games that "use 3-4 cores" actually manage to push overall CPU usage beyond 50% on a quad-core CPU?

it only takes 1 core to be over used to bottleneck a system so any off loading to other threads helps. so its not a matter of how much cpu is being used it is how much is being used on each core. the more cores you have the more off loading that can be done.

btw i regurally see above 60% usage on my 2600k in bf3 and above 40% in most games. on a hyperthreaded dual core those numbers would probably bottleneck.

If a given thread ends up choking while other threads are waiting/done, the code needs better factoring. That is what I was alluding to when I said efficient and effective use of multiple cores. Making "random" use of multiple cores (throwing stuff to threads without paying much attention to work balance and synchronization between threads) is a very different thing from optimizing for multi-core.

coding sometimes doesnt work like that though.

Which is why it is better to have higher IPC cpus.

Maybe most of the games you are interested in playing may use more than 2 cores, but the vast majority of games still only use 2 cores. A few only use 1 core.

thats probably fair but in 1-2 years the amount of games using 1-2 cores will be an ever fewer percentage.

IPC is one part of it. Another is branch prediction which is where Intel shines as well as cache latency. Also all instructions are saved in the L3 cache (on Sandy Bridge or higher) in case a core needs it again reducing access time.



This I doubt. The only way we will see that is when the next gen of consoles hits (and I mean XBox/PS not Wii). Once they have quad cores or better (Cell doesn't count) we will see games to start moving towards more than two cores and then there is the speed of that actually happening as it takes years.

It has been 10 years since the beginning of desktop multi-processing/multi-threading yet the average game today is still fundamentally single-threaded with light/moderate use of a 2nd or 3rd core when available. It will likely take the better part of 10 more years for mainstream games to require quad-core to achieve reasonable playability.

Threading is easier said than done, particularly in a game's core logic which generally does not lend itself well to threading due to its non-linear/unpredictable nature.

xbox 360 and ps3 already are triple cores(assuming the 6 SPEs are like hyperthreading threads) and the next gen xbox 720s are rumored to have an 8 core intel cpu.... ive also seen 16 core rumored but likes be real....

i guess my opinion is skewed from the games i play.