Now to your question:
Intel and AMD own the landscape for General Purpose computers....
For Gamers and Video processors the top end Intel processors are the fastest and most expensive....
In my humble opinion for General usage AMD delivers the best Performance per buck...when you consider the whole platform including motherboard...
I just assembled a machine that has an ASUS Motherboard with the new 880 AMD chip ,...ill handle the new SATA III (6 Gb/sec and the new USB 3 ....and had BIOS ready for the AMD Thuban 6 processor chip.
Runs very nicely,...responsive and rarely encounters anything on the web that slows it down.
Motherboard and processor under half the price of the top end Intel chip.
Not as fast though...I guess...but for what I do...I doubt the intel would be faster. I do have 4 Gig of memory but rarely get over 50 & usage....
But my criteria is to have a machine that is always waiting ON ME.....
No man should wait on a Machine.....
And for consoles the POWER/PowerPC architecture pretty much has it wrapped-up. :)