Intel vs. AMD Processors
The war between Intel vs. AMD has been going on for centuries. OK, maybe not centuries but, for as long as I can remember Intel and AMD have been rivals. Not everybody is tech savvy, that's why when the choice comes up, often times people don't know which is better Intel or AMD? Today, we'll be breaking it down from price, to performance. Long ago the line was clear that AMD was a big competitor in terms of speed when they released their Athlon 64 line, showing Intel that GigaHertz wasn't the whole story.
Since then Intel has learned from its mistakes however. Over the years they've gained our trust back, processor by processor. Now Intel's Core i7 line comes with 4 cores and 4 threads (virtual cores). This may seem like nothing compared to AMD's new FX series 8xxx which offers up to 8 actual cores. However looking at some benchmarks we see flaws in AMDs coding. We notice that in brand name games such as Far Cry 2 and Crysis 2 the Phenom and FX series have a 20-30 FPS difference between the Core i7 series. 20 FPS is too much of a big margin to ignore.
The problem I see here is that AMD didn't spend enough time optimizing it's CPU for gamers' needs. It choose to go with synthetic benchmarks, and real world applications. However, this isn't that bad. AMD's performance in servers, and multi-threaded applications is very much up to par with Intel's Core i7. This is a big shock due to the fact that Intel's i7 can cost up to $900 while the FX series only cost up to around $250. Scaling this up in a server environment, or a work environment can mean big improvements and big savings! We can clearly see here who AMD's new target audience was, mid-range gamers and server applications.
So going back to the main question, which is better Intel or AMD? The question has become somewhat meaningless as we see that the companies have branched off so much now that a battle isn't very comparable. In terms of straight performance we can clearly say the i7 series is superior, however are you, the consumer really going to spend up to $900 for a cpu that will probably be outdated in a year? Or would you rather choose a $250 equivalent that you probably won't notice the difference on?
This was a guest post by TechStat.Net. Click here for more information on the best graphic card for the money.
Translate
