What do all these benchmarks mean?

To put things into simple perspective.

The AMD 2011 system has much power on tap and the flexibility to apply this power to give good performance in various types of applications but lacks raw speed. From what we have seen of AMD's product design and marketing approach with their 'Fusion' brand this seems to have been the idea all along.

The AMD system needs faster CPU and Graphics clock speed to give it the edge over Intel outright.

The INTEL 2011 system is faster, significantly faster in some specific applications but lacks overall power. Due to its relatively weak (but much improved over previous Intel Graphics) graphics it does poorly in some applications.

The Intel system needs a much more powerful graphics solution plus the ability for the CPU and GPU to work together in a seamless fashion for it to have the edge over AMD outright.

Both systems are the same price, If we add graphics to the Intel platform that is faster that what it already can do this adds another $75-$100 on top of the purchase price. The AMD system already has a GPU so no additional purchase is necessary, However the AMD A8 has a price premium over the Intel i3 but only enough for a small graphics card. Given the improvement Intel 2011 graphics has other previous generations the purchase of a $20-$40 graphics card from NVIDIA or AMD will not give much benefit unless the user has specific applications or games which require either brand of GPU to be used.

We can see the significance and boost good graphics gives a PC by comparing the benchmark scores achieved by the AMD and INTEL systems against those achieved by the INTEL Core2Duo system with NVIDIA GTX460 graphics.

Benchmark Summary