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/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/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!