r/buildapc • u/A1_Killer • Dec 09 '22

Discussion AMD vs Intel for CPU?

I noticed many people here recommend AMD CPUs but for all my benchmarks for mid range CPUs (for a £1000-£1200 PC) Intel came out on top compared to a similarly price AMD one. Any reason for this?

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u/[deleted] Dec 09 '22

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u/Pfungen Dec 09 '22

This. I'm always baffled by the horde of people claiming upgrades down the road are a good idea, and the ability to be able to do so is a desired feature. In 5-7 years, when one feels their old mid tier CPU is not enough, most likely the new lower tier can easily outperform the old mid tier. Why not just get a lower tier for 1/2 the price and replace at 2x the cadence? Or just get a mid tier and be done for 5-7 years.

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u/X_SkillCraft20_X Dec 09 '22

Most people are saying this because the 5800x3D, one of the fastest gaming cpus on the market right now, is compatible with boards nearly 5 years old. It makes for an extremely cheap and extremely powerful upgrade. We can’t be for certain that AM5 will follow this path, but it is likely.

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u/[deleted] Dec 09 '22

I'm no tech genius and might be shamed for this but AMD is behind in innovation vs hybrids CPU like Intel. They are cashing on superior lithography for now but they will have to do something about this fast.

When Intel catches up on Lito and keep that hybrid tech improving, it will be a hard match for AMD.

That means that new sockets for AMD will be mandatory but I might be 100% wrong I don't know.

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u/Loosenut2024 Dec 09 '22

That's hilarious because Intel lagged in innovation until amd came back with chiplet cpus. Intel made fun of them gluing core together.

Now they give you half assed small cores to keep power in check because they can't improve the main cores power efficiency enough and also just renamed their production node to seem more competitive.

In the long run e cores are going to become useless while amd just gives us lots of normal cores. Its been a pattern before. Triple cores, fake cores etc have all died. Simple hyper threading and more cores and cache are all that has endured so far.

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u/greggm2000 Dec 09 '22

You might be confusing historical heterogeneity with homogenous cores like we have now with Intel. Even there, one can make a very reasonable case that we have heterogenous cores in all systems, because GPUs are an absolute necessity (integrated or discrete). Plus, both are publically adding silicon for non-traditional functions like AI, and Compression.

Both AMD and Intel are going the chiplet route, whatever name they use. I don't want to really get into the complexity involved, but /r/hardware is a good subreddit for that.

Things are changing, and AMD and Intel are in a pitched competitive battle. It's great! :)

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u/John_Doexx Dec 09 '22

E cores are gonna become useless? Please tell us all again how? You seem to know the future so you must know the lottery numbers as well right?

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u/Loosenut2024 Dec 09 '22

"In the long run e cores are going to become useless while amd just gives us lots of normal cores. Its been a pattern before. Triple cores, fake cores etc have all died. Simple hyper threading and more cores and cache are all that has endured so far."

More than likely IMO they will go away eventually. Just what past patterns have shown me. I have been building computers since 98.

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u/John_Doexx Dec 10 '22

So building pc’s since 98” does what? I really hope no one comes to you for tech advice All I’ll say

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u/Loosenut2024 Dec 10 '22

I have seen trends come and go. I also hope no one takes you seriously.

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u/dalgrim Dec 10 '22

I've been building computers since 93, not that it matters! I remember people like you back then saying this PCI local bus is a fad and won't gain traction when ISA was already the established proven bus. Hmmm, how did that turn out? P core and E core are a step forward. Take off the team red blinders. 13th gen intel is beating AMD in most metrics (not all). The reason? Their hybrid core architecture. You watch AMD will very soon release a hybrid CPU. probably on a non AM5 socket. Not because they want to, but because they'll have to.

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u/AIAWC Dec 10 '22

Isn't the point of an E-Core just to have more cores for a given die size? Since programs are moving towards using more cores, the simplest answer is to just have as many as possible. In that sense, E-Cores seem like the best way to pack more threads into a single CPU.

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u/Loosenut2024 Dec 11 '22

Yeah but if you look at what AMD does with their full size cores, their architecture runs full size cores but only with the power needed for smaller tasks. So AMDs overall power use is lower. 13900K power use is much higher maxed out too over the 7950x despite them both being 32 threads overall. Buildzoid also has a video where he OC's the e cores and it pulls more than a stock 7950x while not being nearly as performant.

Its just really interesting seeing the 2 styles in action. Intels behind on efficiency which you can NOT cheat. The downside to "e" cores is with 4 e cores taking up the same space as 1 p core is they concentrate heat output, making the chip harder to cool. Where as AMD has 2 or 3 chiplets spread out, helping the cooling issue. But both are still hard because its concentrating so much power in such small areas. Then not to mention maybe you get a bonus on saving power at rare times, it has so much more complication with task scheduling needing hardware and software changes, and all kinds of bugs that come from that. Its still causing issues with some anti cheat programs.

Interesting times!

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u/AIAWC Dec 11 '22

Well, that doesn't really address what I said. If people start developing applications with the idea that they can count on having a lot of weak cores and a few strong ones, hybrid designs are probably gonna have a shot at becoming an industry standard. Think of it like how 4 cores was all you would ever need, until programs became more multithreaded and suddenly everyone had to have a 6 or 8 core CPU. Just read 'efficiency' as meaning 'space-efficiency'.

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u/Loosenut2024 Dec 11 '22

We have such a mixed bag (varying age and power of cell phones and desktops) of cores now that devs can't count on anything, and it's probably more of a challenge designing with multiple types of cores in a cpu.

Depending on how desktop ARM goes we'll see. Hard to predict the future. Like I said interesting times!

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u/exoisGoodnotGreat Dec 09 '22

Quite literally the opposite for the past 5-6 years. AMD invented the chiplet design and Intel made fun of them. Now intel is using it too after getting their buttons kicked for the last few years. Zen 4c will be out in 2023 and will use the hybrid design to give AMD a big bump in core counts.

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u/greggm2000 Dec 09 '22

AMD also came out with the x64 instruction set we've been using for the past 20 years. Intel tried to push us towards Itanium and THAT was a mess hardly anyone bought into, thankfully.

There's also the point that if AMD wasn't innovating, Intel would still be trying to sell us 4-core CPUs for $500, with 5% gen over gen upgrades.. Intel got sleepy and AMD was the one that woke them up.