With Mantle and TrueAudio I'm not particularly worried, and the HSA app benchmarks look pretty serious too. They might not be better for apps you get right this moment, but there's a lot to be said for it long term.
If you think a bit faster GPU access and offsetting audio is going to compensate for a 20% computational difference, someone is misleading you.
If you look at gaming now, 90% of the titles are CPU bottlenecked up to 1080p, not GPU. Thus TrueAudio or Mantle will do nothing to help them.
As for thread out to the GPU (HSA), Windows 8 already is doing more of this than people realize.
(Even going back to Vista, OS level software was using early DirectCompute on DX10 hardware, which has been extended in 7 and further in 8 where the OS is taking older software code and shoving it through the GPU when it can.)
A lot of WinRT is using or set up to use the GPU/CPU agnostically, and this may help AMD, but they are going to still need to meet Intel on per core processing.
With Windows 9 (newer concepts brought over from the XB1 development) , more of this happen, but by the time it and other software catches up to provide necessary gains, Intel's GPU adaptations will be closer to what AMD is producing.
The other problem facing AMD is NVidia is retooling for mobile and mobile GPU additions to Intel devices. This could mean discrete NVidia GPUs in tablets running close to the power range of Intel HD GPUs.
When it comes down to base level performance, single thread speeds are crucial. Even if you have 64 cores, if executing a single thread on one core is 20% slower, that software is still going to run 20% faster on a i3/i5 CPU. Even when dealing with 4-8 threads on an i5 class processor it is going to be 10-20% faster than the fastest 8 core AMD CPU.
I'm an not a fan of AMD or Intel on this subject. They both have done good and really disgusting things to the technology market.
Part of Intel's laziness in the past years is waiting out the ATI/AMD integration and 'just' staying ahead of them in core speeds. It is why their lower end mobile 'Atom' technology stood still while Microsoft literally begged them to move it forward over 5 years ago.
AMD also let their CPU performance tank in favor of their GPU technologies. This has kept them a bit ahead of NVidia, but at the cost of remaining competitive with Intel. It shouldn't have needed to be a trade off.
AMD had a better SoC technology they got from Microsoft and started with a better multi-core technology, and have fallen behind Intel with both. There is also no reason AMD should have let up advances on their APUs and let Intel get their HD 4xxx GPUs running as fast as AMD integrated GPUs.
All these technologies you mention will help AMD, but they will also help Intel. I see people also mention hUMA as a savior, but they forget or missed that Microsoft created the software version of this technology back in 2005/2006 and it has been in Windows NT since Vista. (As is how the WDM/WDDM and full video subsystem works in Vista and more specifically the evolution of how it works in Windows 8 today. Notice when AMD talks hUMA, they are very specific to talk about it in 'hardware', because engineers will quickly point out NT is already doing it in software.)
