Intel vs AMD

[Hotnuggets]

I've always had the impression that Intel was better than AMD and the only thing AMD chips were good for was if you wanted a cheaper CPU. Of course that's not true, but i still don't get what is good and bad with AMD chips when it comes to AMD vs Intel. Could someone give me an explanation on what makes choosing AMD a good idea? obviously each chips have their own positives and negatives, I'm just wondering why choose one over the other.

[Andrew0472]

oh no not one of these threads 

[Pingypoker]

There is no definite answer. It's all in the price point.

[Daannnyy]

Don't even bother with AMD just stick with Intel mate

[HutchisonSorbo]

Ugh.

[MbV93]

Intel is generally better but AMD gives great price to performance. Intel's cores are more powerful, they're better at IPC, more power efficient and they're farther down the die shrinkage, Intel is approaching 14nm which gives them some of these characteristics like power efficiency, while AMD is just rolling out 28nm chips. It just comes down to Intel having a shit ton more cash than AMD.

[digitalnav]

Intel chips are indefinitely better. However, for those on a budget, AMD works fine.

[Imabigmac]

WHY? Fan boys Ahoy. 

[CoolBeans]

Don't even bother with AMD just stick with Intel mate

Um, nvm

[Akolyte]

I've always had the impression that Intel was better than AMD and the only thing AMD chips were good for was if you wanted a cheaper CPU. Of course that's not true, but i still don't get what is good and bad with AMD chips when it comes to AMD vs Intel. Could someone give me an explanation on what makes choosing AMD a good idea? obviously each chips have their own positives and negatives, I'm just wondering why choose one over the other.

Mate, everyone has different experiences, and all I can say is don't listen to people with just one answer. Try them out, use what you want. Generally Intel runs cooler than AMD, and I've had my own experiences and there are some Intel processors that are total crap and some AMD that are total crap. And as long as you trust it, and trust the reviews and reputation you should be fine. However out of all un-bias-ness I'm saying that if your going to go with a really really cheap build you want to go for Intel because they generally are better quality, but slower as if your in the mid to high range, it really comes down to what processor you get and theres really only minor reliability difference. Hope this helps

WHY? Fan boys Ahoy.

Listening to Fanboys is what causes trouble. But people on the Forums trust us to give them an un-bias opinion.

[D3MON]

"intel are better amd is a cheaper alternative" THIS IS NOT TRUE AND HASNT BEEN FOR YEARS!.
before dismissing me as a fanboy you need some history.

back in 2005 amd was kicking intels arse, amd had the super expensive $800 "fx51 athlon 64" and so on, intel we're the underdogs, thier pentium 4 had hyperthreading and offered rubbish performance for the cost AND nothing really used multiple threads so hyperthreading was largely worthless, PLUS intels pentium 4's needed to be clocked higher and produced tons of heat, all sounds a bit familiar doesn't it.

from what ive can gather intel went back to the drawing board and focus'd on improving IPC and power consumption, and through thier core and core2 architectures and thanks to a die shrink/new architecture "tick-tock" way of design they have done a good job things becoming multi-threaded started to take effect too, slowly the tables turned

at the same time amd improved thier k6 architecture bit by bit and refined it more and more adding cores, improving the northbridge, the hypertransport, the prefetch and level 3 cache etc and then realised that the future would likely become multi-threaded and Im guessing they came out with the idea of modules, rather than having a software based form of hyperthreading they would create a hardware based form with actual functioning hardware doing the job, this would give a 100% performance increase rather than the 5-50% boost intel gets from their hyperthreading.
hence the module architecture was born, by now peoples ideas of intels more efficient chips and amd beign the budget option has stuck in peoples heads, this and the problematic launch of bulldozer kind of killed it for AMD, stereotypes are hard to end...

The truth of the matter is intel having had the lead for so long is now starting to only get marginal performance increases wheras amd are making bigger advances and closing the gap, also amd nor intel are stupid, they do testing and if in a given task their proccessor performs the same as the others product...they price it the same (linus has said this before on a live stream, its not rocket science).
the only tricky situation here is in badly threaded games intels better ipc can pull anywhere from a 10% to 40% increase in frames though this largely depends on the games.
in other situations where lots of threads are needed an 8 threaded such as rendering or gaming AND streaming etc an AMD fx will blow its price equivilant i5 into the weeds.
knowing this...where do you price them? it depends what you want to do.

if you look back at threads like "e8400 vs q6600" people used to recommend the 8400 because it was faster clocked and often overclocked way higher than its quad core brothers and "games dont even use more than 2 cores yet".
up untill recently allot of games like minecraft, kerbal space program, world of tanks, wow, skyrim (most mmorpg's) still only used 2 cores, in the last 2 weeks i have noticed a huge change, allot of these games now evenly use various cores of a proccessor minimising any bottlenecks, i havent tested world of tanks personally but run task manager after some intense action and see...those years of having 2 cores maxed and 2 cores idle are starting to disappear.

APU's are another example of why this is, most of us know that gpu's are very good at parallel processing and will likely soon be utilised for tasks that require lots of things to be calculated at once, amd's architecture was very forward thinking in this and will likely be a good option for the near future as games consoles are now being designed to use 8 core apu's.
not to damn AMD with faint praise but they will still have some work to do regarding power consumption and ipc for things that cannot be easily multi-threaded but given they have bigger gaps to jump in process node it looks promising.

so to all you amd and intel fans you might want to stop the fanboyism and just look at what you do and what you need and base your choices on that, want an on board mSSD go intel, want lots of forward/backwards socket compatability  (and no sata issues) go amd.
fwiw I had an athlon k6(still got it), then a athlon xp, then an athlon 64 3200+(still got it), then a e5200 (still got it), then a q6600 (yeah that too) and now ive had a few phenoms and love them!
i'm deciding between a £100 board+a £116 amd 8 core and a second hand 3930k (around £300) and a £300 2011 board, whatever it is, itll have lots of threads because you can always overclock and i want to convert files quickly which uses as many threads as i can get and gaming wont be an issue on either.

oh and if anyones interested once i get my arse in gear im benchmarking my old 3200+(2ghz) vs my brothers (now my) pentium 4 2.8ghz vs my athlon 64 4000+ (2.4ghz), itll probably just be cinebench or something, but lets see how times have changed.

[Imabigmac]

The truth of the matter is intel having had the lead for so long is now starting to only get marginal performance increases wheras amd are making bigger advances and closing the gap.          

and the Fx-9590 is an HUGE advancement? 

 

I'am very curious to see happens in the next year or two based on your points from the history of Intel vs. AMD and the constantly changing game structure.   

[D3MON]

and the Fx-9590 is an HUGE advancement? 

 

I'am very curious to see happens in the next year or two based on your points from the history of Intel vs. AMD and the constantly changing game structure.   

no the 9590 was just marketing, even i shook my head at that one, that said its our fault, we show them that we will buy a £1000 graphics card then they will make it, same for cpu's, we guessed they'd drop the price right after, If people have the money to burn just to say they have the top of the line thats thier problem.

if i was going to make a generic-best bang/buck build, it'd be an 8320 and a 7950 (or if they add mantle to the 7950 it'll probably be the r9-280) with 2x4gb of ram.

and like its been said the improvements in silicon are shrinking (i think its because the difference in size between nodes is shrinking), its like running into progressively thicker treacle lol.

[WoodenMarker]

What makes one a better choice than another depends on the situation. There are also a variety of choices from both AMD and Intel. 

[_Vigo_]

AMD have better integrated graphics, so for htpc builds i'm going to use them.