That's strange. Intel's 32nm Sandy Bridge 2600k is more energy efficient overall and has better single thread performance than AMD's 28nm FX-8350, while having almost equal multi-threaded performance.
My bad.
>AMD part has 1.2B transistors on a 315mm^2 die and the Intel part has 1.16B transistors on a 216mm^2 die
Yeah, I recently read somewhere that AMD significantly improved die area and power consumption of next FX cpu by using tools from graphics division. So it looks like the difference is not only in Intel's process advantage.
Two generations away, but eventually we'll be seeing AMD processors that are denser and thus cheaper, but with potentially lower clock speeds. I suspect Intel's got the resources to do a much better job of laying out a chip, but it's hard to say whether that's a process advantage or a chip design advantage.