At the more entry-level segments of the market, an AMD processor tends to offer better value for money, with standouts like the X and offering amazing multitasking and gaming performance. Factors outside of performance may make you choose one manufacturer over the other. On the other hand, AMD offers overclocking on its cheaper B-series chipset, allowing budget builders to squeeze the most performance out of their machine.
AMD is the better option for desktops right now, but that could change soon. Intel is set to launch its hybrid Alder Lake processors in late If you want to use your PC for heavy video editing at high resolutions, perform intensive video transcoding, or perform any other intensive task that can benefit from even more power than the best mainstream CPUs can offer, then high-end desktop, or HEDT CPUs, could be what you need.
Both AMD and Intel have their own options in this space, with higher core and thread counts. They also support a greater number of PCIExpress lanes — 64 versus just 44 on the Intel alternatives — making them more suited to larger storage arrays.
If you can make your work more efficient and even more profitable by buying them, though, that cost might be worth paying. These versions are almost identical to the base models, just with support for more memory and PCIe lanes. AMD is set rumored to launch Threadripper chips this year.
AMD has its Epyc range, which is currently in its third generation. The Intel Xeon W is the most impressive of the lot with 28 cores and 56 threads, These processors are based on the Intel 7 manufacturing process , which is also showing up in the Alder Lake desktop platform. The laptop market is a different story. Ice Lake CPUs introduced a more efficient design with far more capable 11th-gen graphics, offering enough performance to play many esports games at around 60 frames per second fps without the need for a graphics card.
The 11th-gen Tiger Lake mobile processors only further that, such as the one found in the Acer Swift 5. We've reviewed both the Ryzen 9 X and the Intel iK to give you more insight on each processor's capabilities, performance, and price.
Both processors give you plenty of power, but each has their own pros and cons. As mentioned before, the Ryzen 9 X has 16 cores and 32 threads. This gives you all the power you need and then some to tackle everyday multitasking and general workloads in an office setting. It also has enough juice to give you great frame rates in both full HD and 4K gaming settings so you don't have to deal with terrible amounts of lag or screen tearing. The entire Ryzen series are all fairly evenly-matched when it comes to frame rates and multitasking abilities, so it all comes down to how many cores and threads you'll need.
The Ryzen 9 X features dual channel memory support and 64MB of cache. This ensures faster recall of your frequently-used files and programs. With a base clock speed of 3.
The Intel iK has half the number of cores and threads as the Ryzen 9 X, but it makes up for some of that with slightly stronger single core performance. The iK has a base speed of 3. It also uses just 95 watts of power compared to the Ryzen 9's watts - though you are getting around half the total performance.
With Intel's integrated graphics, you'll get both full HD and 4K video and graphical support right out of the box. You'll not only get a great picture for both streaming video and playing the latest games, you'll also get awesome frame rates as well, preventing lag and screen tearing. On this page, you can download the latest drivers for integrated Radeon graphics processors or GPUs.
You can also check up on your product's warranty, download full spec sheets, and ask other AMD users questions on a dedicated forum. If you have a problem with a specific unit, you can use a drop-down menu to select your CPU to be directed to a page of driver download links and a customer support page for more in-depth troubleshooting.
Intel's official site also has a dedicated page for technical support when you have trouble with your new or existing CPU. You'll be able to browse a variety of blog posts that answer frequently asked questions, view spec sheets, download drivers, and access the support community forums if your question isn't answered by the FAQ.
That leads to problems with some stock coolers and also requires robust power delivery on your motherboard. Those factors combine to make Intel a notorious power guzzler. Still, in aggregate, AMD's 7nm chips either consume less power or provide much better power-to-performance efficiency. As a result, you'll get more work done per watt of energy consumed, which is a win-win, and AMD's cooling requirements aren't nearly as overbearing.
In fact, the Ryzen series chips are the most power-efficient desktop PC chips we've ever tested, with the Ryzen 5 X offering the best efficiency. The latest Ryzen processors consume less power on a performance-vs-power basis, which equates to less heat generation. That eases cooling requirements. Intel offers the most overclocking headroom, meaning you can gain more performance over the baseline speed with Intel chips than you can with AMD's Ryzen processors.
As mentioned, you'll have to pay a premium for Intel's K-Series chips and purchase a pricey Z-Series motherboard, not to mention splurge on a capable aftermarket cooler preferably liquid , to unlock the best of Intel's overclocking prowess.
However, once you have the necessary parts, Intel's chips are relatively easy to push to their max, which often tops out at over 5 GHz on all cores with the 11th-Gen Rocket Lake processors. Intel doesn't allow full overclocking on B- or H-series motherboards, but it has infused memory overclocking into its B and H chipsets, and that works with any chip that is compatible with the platform, meaning all 10th-Gen Comet Lake, 11th-Gen Rocket Lake, and 11th-Gen Comet Lake Refresh processors.
That can provide a big boost to locked chips, like the Core i we recently reviewed. AMD doesn't have as much room for manual tuning. In fact, the maximum achievable all-core overclocks often fall a few hundred MHz beneath the chips' maximum single-core boost.
That means all-core overclocking can actually result in losing performance in lightly-threaded applications, albeit a minor amount. Part of this disparity stems from AMD's tactic of binning its chips to allow some cores to boost much higher than others. In tandem with AMD's Precision Boost and innovative thread-targeting technique that pegs lightly-threaded workloads to the fastest cores, AMD exposes near-overlocked performance right out of the box.
That results in less overclocking headroom. However, AMD offers its Precision Boost Overdrive, a one-click auto-overclocking feature that will wring some extra performance out of your chip based on its capabilities, your motherboard's power delivery subsystem, and your CPU cooling.
AMD's approach provides the best performance possible with your choice of components and is generally hassle-free. In either case, you still won't achieve the high frequencies you'll see with Intel processors 5.
AMD has also vastly improved its memory overclocking capabilities with the Ryzen series, which comes as a byproduct of the improved fabric overclocking capabilities. That allows AMD memory to clock higher than before while still retaining the low-latency attributes that boost gaming performance. Winner: Intel. Just be prepared to pay for the privilege — you'll have to buy a K-series processor. Intel has added memory overclocking to the newest B- and H-series motherboards, which is an improvement.
AMD's approach is friendlier to entry-level users, rewarding them with hassle-free overclocking based on their system's capabilities, but you don't gain as much performance. There are a few major underlying technologies that dictate the potency of any chip. The most fundamental rule of processors still holds true: The densest process nodes, provided they have decent power, performance, and area PPA characteristics, will often win the battle if paired with a solid microarchitecture.
Instead, the company designs its processors and then contracts with outside fabs that actually produce the chips. In the case of AMD's current-gen Ryzen processors, the company uses a combination of GlobalFoundries 12nm process and TSMC's 7nm node for its chips, with the latter being the most important. TSMC's 7nm node is used by the likes of Apple and Huawei, among many others, so it benefits from industry-wide funding and collaborative engineering.
The result is what Intel itself calls a superior 7nm process compared to Intel's 10nm and 14nm chips. Intel says its process tech won't achieve parity with the industry again until , and it won't retake leadership until it releases 5nm at an undefined time. The benefits of TSMC's 7nm node mean AMD can build cheaper, faster, and denser chips with more cores, and all within a relatively low power consumption envelope. That lends the designs a comfortable lead, provided they're combined with a decent design.
We don't have to focus on Intel's 10nm for this article: Intel has been stuck for six long years on the 14nm process for its desktop chips, which isn't changing any time soon, and its 10nm chips that have debuted in laptops are constrained by the thermal and power limitations of a laptop chassis. Regardless of whether AMD can lay claim to developing the 7nm node to wrest the lead from Intel, the company had the foresight to contract with TSMC to gain access to a superior process node technology.
That bedrock advantage gives AMD a wonderful silicon canvas to paint its microarchitectures on, a combination that Intel is finding impossible to beat with its 14nm chips. AMD's only concern is production capacity: While AMD has access to 7nm production, the company can't source enough silicon from TSMC, at least in the near term, to match the power of Intel's captive fabs. That leaves AMD exposed to shortages and potentially restricts market penetration. We've seen the most painful example of that weakness in the wake of AMD's Ryzen and Radeon launches.
Meanwhile, Intel has plenty of processors available. Intel has been stuck on 14nm for desktop processors for six years. Intel needs a good 10nm or 7nm desktop chip; the sooner, the better.
When comparing AMD vs Intel CPUs, we must consider that two design decisions have a big impact on performance, scalability, and performance-per-dollar: Interconnects and microarchitecture. AMD's Infinity Fabric allows the company to tie together multiple dies into one cohesive processor. Think of this as numerous pieces of a puzzle that come together to form one larger picture. The approach allows the company to use many small dies instead of one large die, and this technique improves yields and reduces cost.
It also grants a level of scalability that Intel might not be able to match with its new mesh interconnect inside its HEDT chips , and it undoubtedly takes the lead over Intel's aging ring bus in its desktop processors.
The move to the Zen 2 architecture brought AMD's processors to near-parity with Intel's finest in terms of per-core performance. That's largely because Intel is stuck on 14nm, and its architectures are designed specifically for the nodes they are built on.
That means promising new Intel microarchitectures can only ride on smaller processes, like 10nm, leaving the company woefully unprepared for its prolonged issues productizing 10nm products. Zen 3 gave AMD a sizable lead in per-core performance, an incredibly important metric that quantifies the speed of the most important building block in a chip design.
Intel's Rocket Lake chips take huge steps forward in per-core performance, leaving both companies on a relatively even playing field in terms of per-core performance. Rocket Lake features the backported Cypress Cove architecture, Intel's first new microarchitecture for the desktop PC since Skylake arrived back in Intel says this new architecture is based on Ice Lake's 'Sunny Cove' architecture and also comes with the same performant 12th-gen Intel Xe LP graphics engine found in the Tiger Lake processors.
This tactic allows Intel to extend the usability of its 14nm process while moving forward on the architectural front. Still, it is merely a stopgap measure while it readies 10nm for the upcoming Alder Lake processors.
You can read more about the Cypress Cove architecture here. Meanwhile, AMD continues plowing forward. AMD's Zen 3 microarchitecture is refined and powerful - allowing the company to eclipse Intel's performance in single-threaded workloads and gaming for the first time since the days of Athlon Zen 3 truly is a watershed moment for AMD, but the company isn't standing still, with new innovative 3D V-Stack versions of its Zen 3 processors coming next year that bring up to a whopping MB of L3 cache in a single processor.
Intel rode its Skylake microarchitecture since , and while Cypress Cove provides impressive performance uplift, it comes as a backported design on an older process node. That's far from ideal and often results in untenable levels of power consumption. AMD, fueled by rapid advances in its designs while Intel leans on a six-year-old process node, has taken the lead in many of the most important aspects of chip design.
AMD has been beset by issues with its CPU chipset drivers and graphics drivers of late , a natural byproduct of its limited resources compared to its much-larger rivals. Intel isn't without its missteps on the driver front, but its reputation for stability helped earn it the top spot in the processor market, particularly with OEMs.
In terms of its established products, Intel's graphics drivers have become much better lately as the company ramps up to bring its dedicated Xe Graphics cards to market. Day-zero game drivers have become the norm for the chip producer, which by virtue of its integrated graphics on its chips, is the world's largest graphics vendor with an install base of over a billion screens—that's a billion slow screens, but who's counting?
Answer: Every PC gamer out there. You might be a little more cautious when approaching Intel's more exotic solutions, though. In the past, the company has developed innovative new products that have been relegated to the dustbin of history due to pricing and market forces, and long-term support for those products might not always be clear cut. AMD still has its work cut out for it.
The company has had several issues with BIOS releases that failed to expose its chips' full performance, though AMD has mostly solved those issues after a long string of updates.
As a side effect of being the smaller challenger, AMD also faces a daunting challenge in offsetting the industry's incessant optimization for Intel's architectures above all others. Upsetting the semiconductor industry is hard, particularly when you're fighting an entrenched and much-larger rival, and sometimes things get broken when you're redefining an industry.
In AMD's case, those broken things consist of operating systems and applications that weren't tuned to extract the full performance of its fledgling first-gen Zen architecture, let alone the core-heavy designs of Zen 2 and Zen 3. Over the last year, Intel has addressed its laggardly driver updates for its integrated graphics, and the company has an army of software developers at its disposal that help ensure its products get relatively timely support with the latest software.
A decade of dominance also finds most software developers optimizing almost exclusively for Intel architectures. AMD has made amazing progress convincing the developer ecosystem to optimize for its radical new Zen architectures.
However, there's still plenty of work to be done as the company moves forward. The last few years have found security researchers poking and prodding at the speculative execution engine that's one of the key performance-boosting features behind all modern chips.
The resulting research has spawned an almost never-ending onslaught of new vulnerabilities that threaten the safety of your system and private data.
Unfortunately, these types of vulnerabilities are incredibly dangerous because they are undetectable—these tactics steal data by using the processor exactly as it was designed; thus, they are undetectable by any known anti-virus program.
The rash of fixes required to plug these holes also continues to grow, and many of them result in reduced performance. That's particularly painful for Intel because it suffers from far more of these vulnerabilities than other vendors. Intel currently has publicly disclosed vulnerabilities , while AMD has only That's a difference in AMD's favor.
It's hard to ascertain if these limited discoveries in AMD processors are due to a security-first approach to hardened processor design, or if researchers and attackers merely focus on Intel's processors due to their commanding market share: Attackers almost always focus on the broadest cross-section possible.
We see a similar trend with malware being designed for Windows systems, by far the predominant desktop OS, much more frequently than MacOS, though that does appear to be changing. Regardless, right now, AMD has had far fewer security holes to plug, and it made a few targeted in-silicon fixes for its Ryzen processors, thus lowering its exposure to the vulnerabilities. We've seen some of the fixes drop performance more than two or three architecture updates on Intel, which is particularly painful, and there's no end to these exploits in sight.
As things stand, Intel is susceptible to far more vulnerabilities than AMD.
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