Then surprise surprise AMD chips trade blows with chips costing more than twice as much [youtube.com] with several tests the AMD outright smoking and in others within a couple percentage points of the i5s.
The issue is that the damage is done; AMD hasn't updated their CPU lineup recently. The FX-8350 was originally released in late 2012 and still seems to be the best option from their FX series. (The FX-8370 is just a nicer binning, and the FX-9xxx appear to be ridiculously overclocked, with almost twice the TDP.) I'm planning to upgrade my PC later this year, but buying a 3 year old CPU just seems insane. In contrast, Haswell processors are barely a year old, and a Haswell i5 delivers comparable performance.
Meanwhile, AMD's APU lines max out at 4 cores, which is a step backwards from my Phenom II hex core, and the APU offers little advantage given that I'd be getting a discrete graphics card anyway. (The main workload for this system is compilation, so believe me when I say that the no. of cores absolutely does matter.)
I'm the sort of person who should be a shoe-in for AMD's high end, but I can't even tell if the FX line is obsolete or not. I think that says a lot about their execution.