In the CPU space, AMD and Intel are always at each other’s throats. Read on to find out which is better in the perennial battle of AMD vs Intel.
By
Gabe Carey2019-06-09T03:09:45Z
Processors
Although the battle between Coffee Lake Refresh and AMD Ryzen 2nd Generation is still raging on, the war between Ryzen 3rd Generation, Ice Lake and Sunny Cove is about to begin. It’s also time for us to dive into the perennial deathmatch: AMD vs Intel. And, right now AMD is on top, selling twice as many processors.
Essentially acting as the brain of your computer, the best processors are behind everything your PC does. This is why it’s so important to find the one for your specific needs – you don’t want to pay for features you don’t need.
Anyone who has followed the frantic battle of Intel vs AMD will probably already know that AMD and Intel have traditionally existed in different lanes. Where Intel has focused on higher clock speeds and efficiency, AMD is all about high core counts and boosting multi-threaded performance.
Still, there’s room for the coexistence of AMD and Intel – they cater to different audiences, with direct competition in the middle. If you’re not quite sure whether to pledge allegiance to either Team Red or Team Blue, continue on to the next slide for a constantly updated look at the AMD vs Intel clash.
Gary Marshall and Michelle Rae Uy have also contributed to this article
For bargain shoppers on the prowl for the next hottest deal, it used to be assumed that AMD’s processors were cheaper, but that was only because Team Red did its best work at the entry level.
Now that Ryzen processors have proven AMD’s worth on the high-end, the tide has ostensibly turned. The $99 (£89, AU$139) AMD Ryzen 3 2200G wipes the floor with Intel’s $64 (about £46, AU$82) Pentium G4560. And, now that the G4560 has been replaced with the newly-announced Intel Pentium G5620 launches for $86 (about £65, AU$120), the entry level desktop market should heat up.
Among mid-range, current-gen chips, Intel is leading the pack by offering 9th-generation Coffee Lake CPUs as low as $122 (about £93, AU$170) for the Core i3-9100T.
Still, on the low end, Intel and AMD processors typically retail at about the same price. It’s once you hit that exorbitant $200 (around £142, AU$252) mark where things get trickier. High-end Intel chips now range from 4 up to 18 cores, while AMD chips can now be found with up to 32-cores.
If you can get your hands on one, the Core i7-9700K is $409 (£499, AU$659), while the still more-capable Ryzen 7 2700X is priced at $329 (about £230, AU$420).
With the AMD Ryzen 3000 processors, which will hit the streets on July 7, the tide will turn once again. The manufacturer recently revealed the prices for its five 7nm Zen 2 CPUs, and they are definitely at a much lower price point. The AMD Ryzen 9 3900X is supposed to compete with the $1,199 (£1,115, about AU$1,713) Intel Core i9-9920X at only $499 (about £390, AU$720), while the AMD Ryzen 7 3800X will offer identical performance to the $479 (£469, AU$684) Intel Core i9-9900K at only $399 (about £310, AU$580).
It was long-rumored that AMD’s Ryzen chips would offer cutting-edge performance at a lower price, and AMD’s 3rd-generation processors might – might being the operative word as Intel is also rumored to refresh its desktop processors to compete – just seal the deal.
For anyone looking to dip their toes into the realm of the HEDT processors, AMD and Intel are very close right now, especially on the heels of the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX, at $1,799 (£1,639, AU$2,679). That might seem like a lot, but compared to the $1,999 (£1,859, AU$2,999) Intel Core i9-9980XE, it’s a downright bargain – especially given that AMD’s offering has nearly double the cores. Word is still out on whether or not Intel’s long-speculated Cascade Lake-X will change that.
If you’re building a gaming PC, truthfully you should be using a discrete graphics card, or GPU (graphics processing unit), rather than relying on a CPU’s integrated graphics to run games as demanding as Middle Earth: Shadow of War.
Still, it’s possible to run less graphically intense games on an integrated GPU if your processor has one. In this area, AMD is the clear winner, thanks to the release of the Ryzen 5 2400G that packs powerful discrete Vega graphics that outperforms Intel’s onboard graphic technology by leaps and bounds.
Yet, as we mentioned before, Intel has officially started shipping its high-end H-series mobile CPU chips with AMD graphics on board. In turn, this means that hardier laptops powered by Intel can now be thinner and their accompanying silicon footprints will be over 50% smaller, according to Intel client computing group vice president Christopher Walker.
All of this is accomplished using Embedded Multi-Die Interconnect Bridge (EMIB) technology, along with a newly contrived framework that enables power sharing between Intel’s first-party processors and third-party graphics chips with dedicated graphics memory.
