AMD vs Intel: Which CPUs Are Better

erek

erek

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Winner: Intel (apparently by a long shot)

"Winner: AMD. The AMD vs Intel CPU security debate continues to evolve as researchers and nefarious actors alike turn more of an eye towards AMD's newer architectures. As things stand, Intel still suffers from more known vulnerabilities than AMD, and the impact of the Spectre mitigations on previous-gen Intel processors leads to larger performance losses (at times equivalent to a few generational gains worth of improvement) than the fixes we've seen from AMD, granting Team Red the win."

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Source: https://www.tomshardware.com/featur...flow&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social
 
erek said:
Winner: Intel (apparently by a long shot)

"Winner: AMD. The AMD vs Intel CPU security debate continues to evolve as researchers and nefarious actors alike turn more of an eye towards AMD's newer architectures. As things stand, Intel still suffers from more known vulnerabilities than AMD, and the impact of the Spectre mitigations on previous-gen Intel processors leads to larger performance losses (at times equivalent to a few generational gains worth of improvement) than the fixes we've seen from AMD, granting Team Red the win."

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Source: https://www.tomshardware.com/featur...flow&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social
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"Specifications"? "Architecture"? What are those if not the magic that gets something done, and as the rest of the report suggests AMD is getting gaming done better, and Intel is getting content creation done better (though I am sure that is arguable)

This list seems highly subjective to me.

That said, I don't think there is any way to not be subjective on this topic.
 
I still don't understand why Intel chose not to have the same video driver support for the Comet Lake than the Rocket Lake etc. I mean you can have high definition video on the Rocket Lake and later that you get on RTX video cards but they won't offer it for Comet Lake.
 
erek said:
Winner: Intel (apparently by a long shot)

"Winner: AMD. The AMD vs Intel CPU security debate continues to evolve as researchers and nefarious actors alike turn more of an eye towards AMD's newer architectures. As things stand, Intel still suffers from more known vulnerabilities than AMD, and the impact of the Spectre mitigations on previous-gen Intel processors leads to larger performance losses (at times equivalent to a few generational gains worth of improvement) than the fixes we've seen from AMD, granting Team Red the win."

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Source: https://www.tomshardware.com/featur...flow&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social
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"Specifications" - Okay
 
blackmomba said:
I thought Tom's was reputable?
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They were. From ~1996 to 2001 when Dr. Thomas Pabst was still at the helm.

Don't get me wrong, there was always some rivalry between the [H] community and the Tom's community, but back in the day when Pabst owned the site it was pretty reputable.

When he sold it in 2001 everything over there went to shit, and has stayed shitty ever since.

So, it has been a while.

What's worse is the same company now owns Anandtech which also used to be reputable but now has slowly turned into garbage.
 
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I will say this, I like AMD for play, but I prefer Intel/Nvidia for work.
Nobody does what CUDA does (yet) and I do not have the time, energy, or budget to get any of the existing open-source projects to where they need to be to take any of my Nvidia stuff out. So until somebody else does Nvidia GPUs all the way for what I need.

I might hate my Intel servers because they are big, hot, heavy, and expensive, but they give me absolutely 0 problems.
My Epyc's are a mixed bag. I have to triple-check any AGESA updates AMD rolls down the pipe because they have a nasty habit of containing surprises you don't see on the Intel side, but sweet Jesus you can get more computational power out of a 1U EPYC than seems reasonable.

Intel on the workstations is easy and they have a part for any weird ass install I am requested to do, and it seems everybody makes one and they all fit, I have interactive displays from 10 years ago and can still buy the socketed computers that slot into them all they way up to 10'th gen. They changed the form factor for 11'th onwards. and while it is better the displays ain't cheap so until they die, on the walls they stay.

AMD tieing themselves to Lenovo for the Threadrippers pisses me off because Lenovo plays garbage games and you pay top dollar for garbage surprises, that is really my only complaint there.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
They were. From ~1996 to 2001 when Dr. Thomas Pabst was still at the helm.

Don't get me wrong, there was always some rivalry between the [H] community and the Tom's community, but back in the day when Pabst owned the site it was pretty reputable.

When he sold it in 2001 everything over there went to shit, and has stayed shitty ever since.

So, it has been a while.

What's worse is the same company now owns Anadtech which also used to be reputable but now has slowly turned into garbage.
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what about TechReport now? https://techreport.com/review/14107/the-tr-podcast-episode-1/

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erek said:
Winner: Intel (apparently by a long shot)

"Winner: AMD. The AMD vs Intel CPU security debate continues to evolve as researchers and nefarious actors alike turn more of an eye towards AMD's newer architectures. As things stand, Intel still suffers from more known vulnerabilities than AMD, and the impact of the Spectre mitigations on previous-gen Intel processors leads to larger performance losses (at times equivalent to a few generational gains worth of improvement) than the fixes we've seen from AMD, granting Team Red the win."
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I personally turn off the mitigations so my CPU runs as fast as possible. As far as I'm concerned there's no virus or malware that makes use of these vulnerabilities. There is malware that will bypass secure boot and TPM2.0 for what it's worth. There's lots of older vulnerable computers used by grandma who hasn't updated their computer since 2010, who would easily give access to their computer if someone claimed they were Bill Gates. If there isn't malware taking advantage of Meltdown and Spectre then mitigations stay off.

As for best CPU, that would be Intel. Why? Because their motherboards aren't $200+ and I don't care about power consumption. If you don't need the latest and greatest CPU's, I've build some PC's recently and they've been with Ryzen 5 5600G because the CPU and motherboards are cheap and it comes with good enough graphics. The CPU is $140 and the motherboard is $100 as well, and not some microATX garbage but the full ATX boards with 4 ram slots because why not? That CPU and motherboard replaced an old AMD A something series on AM3 socket from ages ago, so you can be sure this thing won't see another upgraded for another several years, which by then will likely need a new motherboard to go along with it's CPU. It's not as simple as AMD > Intel.
 
erek said:
what about TechReport now? https://techreport.com/review/14107/the-tr-podcast-episode-1/

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Sadly the new owner has turned my former home into a nightmare. I almost would have just seen them shut it down seeing what it has become. Sadly TR was loosing money for a long time, and reached the point it had to either be shut down or sold. It was hoped the new owner would give it a new lease on life, but he pretty much drove off all the people that made it great in the forums, and turned it into a clickfarm.
 
TLDR: Right now it’s hard to go wrong as AM5 and 13th gen are close enough for most any task. It’s still a “what’s your goal and how to optimize your build for your goal” situation. You know like always!

I’m a self admitted AMD CPU guy as a gamer and mixed use, mostly consumption, PC enthusiast. However, like anything it’s a “ right tool for the job” approach that makes the most sense. I built a lot of Haswell systems for friends and myself during the Bulldozer/ Vishera era. So based on use case and workflow if I were someone using Premiere Pro, and or stuff that needs Cuda and so on right now I would build a 13900k / Nvidia box. From what I’ve read content creators seem to give this combo a recommendation due to software optimization with many creator tools. If time is money and you make money with your PC — get the tool for the job. Not that any of this can’t be done on an AMD platform but even then for content creation you might want an Nvidia gpu depending on your software needs. But AMD has terrific Linux support so now an AMD gpu is more appealing and obviously an all AMD box can do most anything too etc etc.

So buy what you like and enjoy. Analysis paralysis is a bitch.
 
DukenukemX said:
As for best CPU, that would be Intel. Why? Because their motherboards aren't $200+ and I don't care about power consumption. If you don't need the latest and greatest CPU's, I've build some PC's recently and they've been with Ryzen 5 5600G because the CPU and motherboards are cheap and it comes with good enough graphics. The CPU is $140 and the motherboard is $100 as well, and not some microATX garbage but the full ATX boards with 4 ram slots because why not? That CPU and motherboard replaced an old AMD A something series on AM3 socket from ages ago, so you can be sure this thing won't see another upgraded for another several years, which by then will likely need a new motherboard to go along with it's CPU. It's not as simple as AMD > Intel.
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I count 19 motherboards at less than $200. Took me less than 5 mins. Not everything needs x670...

Also, at least at the high end, Intel using double the power or more is embarrassing.

If you want the "best" CPU, I think what brand you go with depends more on the amount of money you have to spend and what you are going to be doing with it.
 
I prefer Intel right now.

Under Linux and FreeBSD there are more profiling and monitoring tools. i7z, intel-pcm etc.

I also tend to stuff mainboards with RAM, and Intel seems to do better with 4 sticks in unbuffered platforms.

Also not liking the BIOS madness every time a new AMD platform is released.
 
TheHig said:
TLDR: Right now it’s hard to go wrong as AM5 and 13th gen are close enough for most any task. It’s still a “what’s your goal and how to optimize your build for your goal” situation. You know like always!

I’m a self admitted AMD CPU guy as a gamer and mixed use, mostly consumption, PC enthusiast. However, like anything it’s a “ right tool for the job” approach that makes the most sense. I built a lot of Haswell systems for friends and myself during the Bulldozer/ Vishera era. So based on use case and workflow if I were someone using Premiere Pro, and or stuff that needs Cuda and so on right now I would build a 13900k / Nvidia box. From what I’ve read content creators seem to give this combo a recommendation due to software optimization with many creator tools. If time is money and you make money with your PC — get the tool for the job. Not that any of this can’t be done on an AMD platform but even then for content creation you might want an Nvidia gpu depending on your software needs. But AMD has terrific Linux support so now an AMD gpu is more appealing and obviously an all AMD box can do most anything too etc etc.

So buy what you like and enjoy. Analysis paralysis is a bitch.
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exactly, finally after 12 years there's legit no bad choice. there's options for literally anyone at any price bracket, any use case, whether you care about performance per watt or not.

uOpt said:
Also not liking the BIOS madness every time a new AMD platform is released.
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i never updated my bios on my x370 taichi in the 2 years i used it. i only updated it to support the 2600x before giving it to a friends kid. my x570 elite i updated to the ABB bios a couple months after buying it and left it there until i had to update them for my 5900x. you really don't need to update them unless there's a fix thats specific to some issue you're having.
 
Rockenrooster said:
I count 19 motherboards at less than $200. Took me less than 5 mins. Not everything needs x670...

Also, at least at the high end, Intel using double the power or more is embarrassing.

If you want the "best" CPU, I think what brand you go with depends more on the amount of money you have to spend and what you are going to be doing with it.
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Just gonna say this once, Intel isn't embarrassing because they're on a 10nm process. AMD is on a 5nm process. Could be there is something to Intel's power draw that's architecture based.... Also, Intel is largely pacing AMD on a grossly inferior process node. When Intel catches up, which they will, fairly certain all bets are off.

I suspect if Intel was on 5nm at the moment, things would be very different.

I am happy for the competition, hope AMD keeps delivering. Lets hope this keeps going on for a while
 
Legendary Gamer said:
Just gonna say this once, Intel isn't embarrassing because they're on a 10nm process. AMD is on a 5nm process. Could be there is something to Intel's power draw that's architecture based.... Also, Intel is largely pacing AMD on a grossly inferior process node. When Intel catches up, which they will, fairly certain all bets are off.

I suspect if Intel was on 5nm at the moment, things would be very different.

I am happy for the competition, hope AMD keeps delivering. Lets hope this keeps going on for a while
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Process nodes are not made equally. Intel's 10nm is as dense as TSMC's 7nm. Their 7nm, with products launching later this year, will be as dense as TSMC's 4nm.
 
Armenius said:
Process nodes are not made equally. Intel's 10nm is as dense as TSMC's 7nm. Their 7nm, with products launching later this year, will be as dense as TSMC's 4nm.
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I am aware of this and people have been extolling the virtues of how dense the Intel Nodes are and nearly every time Intel aims to make their process more dense they either run into node issues or mega delays. When it finally comes out, it's a nothing burger.

Intel has been on the back foot on process nodes for a while now. 10nm is an inefficient pile of manure that they finally managed to get better yields out of. The initial batches of processors on this node were slow, hot and drew a shitload of power (past "x" frequency which I believe was 2.5 Ghz).

There is a certain level of efficiency gained by superior process nodes. Even with AMD opening up the power draw on their CPUs the chips still remain rather efficient compared to Intel. Intel is on an inferior node that might be as dense as TSMC's 5m but it's also less efficient.

Should I say "Smaller" instead of "Superior" ? Or Less Dense but more Efficient ?
 
NightReaver said:
Guess Intel should get some actually good silicon, then. As in top shelf.
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Yeah, I thought they were doing this when they started buying out chunks of TSMC's production on the newer nodes. Now, some of it went to ARC. I thought there was something about Intel manufacturing Tiles on TSMC.... found a pair of articles about Meteor Lake from 2022

https://www.pcmag.com/news/an-intel-tsmc-cpu-intels-tile-architecture-to-mix-and-match-chip-tech

https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/339015-intels-meteor-lake-tiles-will-be-made-mostly-by-tsmc
 
Rockenrooster said:
I count 19 motherboards at less than $200. Took me less than 5 mins. Not everything needs x670...
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I know how to use PCPartPicker too. Four of those boards only support up to 64GB of ram, and the rest are microATX. The motherboard I was thinking of is a B650, for $190. The lowest priced AM4 full ATX board that supports 128GB of ram is $99. The cheapest Full ATX LGA1700 board is $120.
Also, at least at the high end, Intel using double the power or more is embarrassing.
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I didn't care with bulldozer and I still don't care now. It's only using that much power under full load, and that doesn't happen all the time.
If you want the "best" CPU, I think what brand you go with depends more on the amount of money you have to spend and what you are going to be doing with it.
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That should always be how you shop.
Starfalcon said:
Sadly the new owner has turned my former home into a nightmare. I almost would have just seen them shut it down seeing what it has become. Sadly TR was loosing money for a long time, and reached the point it had to either be shut down or sold. It was hoped the new owner would give it a new lease on life, but he pretty much drove off all the people that made it great in the forums, and turned it into a clickfarm.
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You worked for Tech Report?
 
DukenukemX said:
I know how to use PCPartPicker too. Four of those boards only support up to 64GB of ram, and the rest are microATX. The motherboard I was thinking of is a B650, for $190. The lowest priced AM4 full ATX board that supports 128GB of ram is $99. The cheapest Full ATX LGA1700 board is $120.
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Who uses 128GB of ram short of using it for workstation? I have 64GB of ram and that is higher then most get at 32GB of ram here. Not sure why a motherboard needs to support 128GB to be considered a good board. Not liking MicroATX I can understand.
 
Gideon said:
Who uses 128GB of ram short of using it for workstation? I have 64GB of ram at that is higher then most get at 32GB on here. Not sure why a motherboard needs to support 128GB to be considered a good board. Not liking MicroATX I can understand.
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Not many it's just a reason to make excuses.
 
DukenukemX said:
I personally turn off the mitigations so my CPU runs as fast as possible. As far as I'm concerned there's no virus or malware that makes use of these vulnerabilities.
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I'm fairly certain you are wrong about that. However, it's not something that the average user at home needs to worry about.
DukenukemX said:
As for best CPU, that would be Intel. Why? Because their motherboards aren't $200+ and I don't care about power consumption.
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You are kidding right? Both AMD and Intel chipset based boards occupy a wide price range. Companies offering chipsets from both AMD and Intel have motherboards priced between $100 (possibly less) and $2,000 for both platforms. Also, the CPU has nothing to do with the price of the motherboard. While a lot of the motherboard cost is tied up in individual chipsets, AMD and Intel do not set the price for motherboards. Motherboard manufacturers do that.
DukenukemX said:
I've build some PC's recently and they've been with Ryzen 5 5600G because the CPU and motherboards are cheap and it comes with good enough graphics. The CPU is $140 and the motherboard is $100 as well, and not some microATX garbage but the full ATX boards with 4 ram slots because why not?
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Micro-ATX is generally popular with OEMs more so than the DIY crowd. Being full ATX and having four memory slots has nothing to do with anything. I'd argue that the best boards are generally E-ATX anyway. A lot of cheap, shitty motherboards are ATX. Some of the best performing motherboards also only have two memory slots.

As for the original topic, a lot of those check boxes are subjective as they aren't directly comparable. The architectures of Intel and AMD CPU's may accomplish the same tasks, but they vary in their approach. One may be perceived as more elegant than the other, but at the end of the day, elegance is an academic quality in a CPU. What matters is how they perform in the real world, and how much they cost.
 
sirmonkey1985 said:
i never updated my bios on my x370 taichi in the 2 years i used it. i only updated it to support the 2600x before giving it to a friends kid. my x570 elite i updated to the ABB bios a couple months after buying it and left it there until i had to update them for my 5900x. you really don't need to update them unless there's a fix thats specific to some issue you're having.
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Well, a good example is ECC support on AM5 boards. There are more and more AGESA(sp?) updates coming out from AMD, passed through by the vendors and given to users. The release notes are a joke. As far as we can tell we need one more update, so the circle continues.

And what if you have trouble with 4 DIMMs? Wouldn't you try a new BIOS? The release notes would never state whether they made that better (much less that they made it worse). So updating it is.

In fairness, in the Intel world you only get ECC support on the workstation class boards. But at least you know it's working there.
 
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