*Noob Question* - How is the i7-3960x CPU better than the AMD FX-8150 CPU?

[ThePcGamer]

This is always how I thought CPU's were - The amount of processors and the processing speed are what make a cpu's performance.

I, am obviously wrong.

AMD FX-8150 - 8 cores, 3.6GHz
Intel i7-3960x - 6 cores, 3.3GHz

As far as I've seen, with the benchmarks and such, the i7-3960x is #1 over all other cpus, whereas the AMD FX-8150 wasn't even in the top 20.

I want to learn a lot about computers, involving cpu's, ram, gpu, and motherboards mainly. All I'm really asking is, what makes the intel cpu so much better?

 

[Celegorm]

The thing that makes a difference here is the underlying architecture of processors. How they are created to share resources between cores and things like how quickly their transistors can swap states (or simply how many transistors there are) makes much more of a difference than speed.

I won't pretend to be an expert on either of those processors but if you look the different architectures allow for different features as well, like Intel's turbo boost which gives 1 core more power for hard tasks when other cores are idle.

 

[cb600fshornet]

The i7 uses HyperThreading, so the 6 cores allegedly works as 12.

Cache levels are probably different.