The 8350 stock speed is 4.0GHz.
Also there's a lot to the AMD processors, for example they have very large amounts of slower cache compared to the Intel chips, so if you factor that into your programming you can increase the performance. The total instructions per second of the 8350 is also theoretically higher than a 3770k, provided you can utilise all the cores as a 3770k only has 4 cores + 4 hyperthreaded ones where as an 8350 is closer to 8 real cores.
Its not Bulldozer and PIledriver have a LOWER instruction potential than Intel, by quite some margin, Steamroller will however reverse the biggest bottleneck in the architecture.
Currently each module, not core, share a 4 instruction decoder, that means 4 cores can decode 16 instructions and 8 cores can... still decode only 16 instructions. Phenom 2 was 3 per core, so a quad could do 12, and a hexcore phenom 2 could do 18. Intel has had 4 instructions per core for some time, meaning their quad can do 16, and their hex can do 24.
Steamroller fixes the biggest bottleneck, while also moving then to 28nm, and adding a lot of power saving tech(AMD much like Intel has done a lot of work on saving power on Kabini/Kaveri, but more work on IPC than Intel has done for Haswell), it will be 4 per core, so up to 32 for the hexcore.
Decoding instructions is one thing, its certainly a limit that held back single and multithreaded applications. Remember for effective power management two threads uses less power using 2 cores in one module, than 1 core each in 2 modules, its a fine line between when you want lowest power wasting and best performance. When you had 8 threads though there was no way around it, each thread would be limited by that 4 instruction decoder, 28nm allows that little bit of space to essentially expand the inside of each core, improving performance.
That's why waiting for steamroller is worth it, significant improvement in a variety of situations, and 8 full cores for the same price Intel gives you 4 at, we'll probably have 8 core Steamrollers priced against quad core intel's without HT. If steamroller is good enough, it might push HT using quads into the £150 range, which is good, or make them release some hex's on mainstream platforms, also good, maybe both.