AMD or Intel? 🔥 Choose wisely and accelerate your gaming PC 🎮
Key Points
Intel focuses on hybrid design, while AMD emphasizes identical cores. 💻
For Windows laptops, Intel is the best choice; AMD is ideal for gaming desktops. 🎮
Intel is superior for multitasking, but AMD offers more upgrade options. 🔄
A common question is which brand of CPU to buy. My advice is to choose a Specific CPU for its own virtues and not only by brand. However, there are some general use cases that favor one brand over the other.
Intel and AMD Have Different Approaches to CPUs
Although AMD and Intel operate in the same market, they design their CPUs very differently today. Intel has adopted a hybrid design, combining performance and efficiency cores on the same chip, forgoing hyperthreading in its modern CPUs. 🌟
On the other hand, AMD has maintained multithreading and offers CPUs where all cores are identical. While it's not clear which approach is superior, it does mean these CPUs have different strengths and weaknesses. 💪
Windows Laptop? Go Intel
Thanks to its hybrid approach, I recommend that laptop buyers generally opt for an Intel system. Previously, I would have recommended laptops with AMD APUs for their greater graphics power, but the latest generations of Intel CPUs have competent GPUs for most uses. 👍
If you're looking to buy a gaming laptop rather than one for general or business use, then an AMD system with a discrete AMD GPU is a great choice. However, outside of gaming laptops, where model-specific performance is crucial, Intel is often the better choice in my opinion thanks to its efficiency cores. 🔋
Of course, if efficiency and battery life are what you value most, consider ditching both AMD and Intel and opting for a Windows-on-ARM laptop, as long as the software you need runs properly on that system. 🖥️
Desktop for Gaming? Choose AMD
There's nothing wrong with gaming with one of Intel's latest hybrid CPUs. But if you're just going to be gaming and your needs don't require anything different, AMD CPUs are the way to go. In particular, AMD's X3D series offers exceptional gaming performance at lower prices than Intel, leaving you with more budget for a better GPU, a faster SSD, or more RAM. Currently, the AMD Ryzen 9 9800X3D It's the fastest gaming CPU you can buy. Period! 🚀
Are you a professional multitasker? Buy Intel
Intel CPUs today feature a large number of cores, thanks to those small efficiency cores added alongside the performance cores. This makes them excellent for running many applications simultaneously, managing multiple background processes, or performing multithreaded tasks like video editing or streaming video compression. 🎥
You'll often see benchmarks where similarly priced Intel and AMD CPUs are compared on single-core performance or in applications like games that don't use many threads, but then the Intel CPU will outperform the AMD CPU in tasks where all of its cores are in use. There are professional CPUs like AMD's Threadripper series that feature many high-performance cores, but in the mainstream, Intel still has the edge for multitasking. So if you need to do video editing during the day and want to game at night, Intel is the better choice overall. 🎮
Looking for an Upgrade Path? Buy AMD
AMD
AMD has promised support for its AM5 CPU socket standard until at least 2027, and (knowing AMD) probably a bit longer. So, if you build a AM5 desktop system today, you'll have CPU options for years. Intel has a pretty poor track record of sticking with the same socket for more than a generation or two, so if you care about an upgrade path, AMD is the only viable option in my opinion. 🔄
Average computer user? Buy the cheapest. 💸
If you don't have a particular use case and are just looking for a general-purpose computer for web browsing and office work, buy the CPU or system that costs the least. Any modern CPU in a modern PC with a SSD as the primary drive will have a performance more than enough for basic tasks.
Intel and AMD CPU Equivalents Looking for Intel and AMD processor equivalents? Find everything you need to know in our dedicated guide. Learn more now!
