Sorry maui67, almost everything you said is extremely deceptive and misleading.
The problem that 8 core processors have is that there are only a few applications which can utilize that many cores, the same issue that affects the i7 and its multithreading capability.
It's the same issue, yes, but because so much of Bulldozer's processing power is tied up in its core count you can't just dismiss the issue. The fact is that Bulldozer is affected much more severely by poor multithreading than Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge, which is why it gets absolutely
destroyed in single threaded applications. Clock for clock, Bulldozer is the slowest chip on the market. Yes, there's a perfectly good reason that Bulldozer runs slower than it should. Knowing and stating this reason doesn't make the chip any faster, though.
There are a number of things that Bulldozer does better than the Intel cpus and vice versa.
Glossing over the fact that while both have their strengths and weaknesses, SNB/IVB have a lot more strengths and a lot fewer weaknesses than Bulldozer. Basically the only thing Bulldozer actually does really well is highly parallel workloads that involve no floating point calculations. Those workloads are almost nonexistent outside servers (which is funny, because the BD server chips are even farther behind than their desktop chips), which is why the chip fares so poorly in so many benchmarks, and does well in so few.
However, this is not true. The difference is usually a few frames per second. For example, in this review the FX is only a few FPS less than even the Ivy Bridge
You neglect to mention that the reason it's only a few FPS behind is because neither CPU is running at full speed. In reality the Bulldozer chip is running under a higher load, consuming more energy and putting out more heat to perform the same amount of work. When you remove the GPU bottleneck, Bulldozer falls very, very far behind. If your only uses are gaming and web browsing, I can't help but think you're wasting your money buying anything more powerful than a Phenom II. You just don't need the CPU speed.
Using bottlenecked games as an argument in favor of Bulldozer is like saying "Hey, you clearly don't need to spend $200+ on a CPU, so you should obviously buy the least powerful $200 CPU you can find." The conclusion does not follow.
Is the Intel i5/i7 faster than the AMD FX cpus? Generally, yes, but only in benchmarks.
No, Intel is just plain generally faster, not limited to benchmarks. Many of those benchmarks that you dismiss are actual applications that people use every day. They just happen to have highly repeatable results, so they're also great for comparing the relative power of chips.
Also, you seem to have confused benchmarks with synthetics. A benchmark is an incredibly useful way to compare processors, and is literally the only objective way to do so. They've been used for decades and are accepted by the world at large as a fair way to compare performance.
Synthetics (like PCMark), on the other hand, are programs that do not represent actual usage, and instead exist only to apply a predetermined load on a processor. These can show significant differences between largely equal chips due to idiosyncrasies in the way the chips work. This can result in the benches being meaningless, with a chip putting up unusually low or high numbers, or expose design flaws, like Bulldozer's crippled floating point performance.
In most cases you are not going to be able to tell the difference between the two in a real world setting.
If by "most cases" you mean Facebook and video games. In almost anything that can actually make use of the processing power without some other bit of hardware getting in the way, SNB/IVB stomp Bulldozer into the ground. The only time Bulldozer wins? Massively parallel integer exclusive workloads. Also known as server workloads.
You also neglect to mention that in these cases you also can't tell the difference between a Phenom II and a Bulldozer. I don't think it's meaningful in any way to point out that when you're not asking much of your CPU, you don't need the most powerful CPU. File that one under N for "No ***, Sherlock."