Intel vs. AMD

Let’s discuss CPUs. More specifically - Intel vs. AMD.

Well, I never thought I’d hear myself say this (or in this case, write), but simply put - AMD are wiping the floor with Intel right now, which to many it comes as a surprise, while to many others it’s merely an “it was only a matter of time” moment. Let me provide you with a little bit of context...

I have always gone for, or chosen Intel CPUs for systems, regardless of the given use case at hand, simply because I subjectively thought of Intel as the superior option to go for. Traditionally, this may have been true for 99% of single threaded operations, however, the past year and a half has seen a vast shift towards AMD being on top in many regards.

Let’s begin with architectural differences. Last August (2019), AMD released their Zen 2 range of CPUs, which marked a huge point in the competition’s journey, as they were based upon the company’s new 7nm architecture, as opposed to 14nm from Zen 1. Furthermore, Zen 2 also added support for PCIe 4.0, enabling consumers with significantly more bandwidth and the ability to utilise x4 extra lanes, predominantly for their GPUs and NVMe M.2 SSDs. Fast forward a year, AMD’s recently released Zen 3 architecture adds huge performance gains to their single threaded workloads, amongst many other upgrades.

Meanwhile, Intel’s latest 10th generation processors, which came out in June 2020, are still based upon the old 14nm architecture, and also lack support for PCIe 4.0.

To address AMD’s huge success of their Zen 3 release, Intel announce an unexpectedly early release of their 11th generation CPUs in Q1 2021, only ~9 months after the previous release. This would be all well and healthy for overall competition, if only it had the right execution; 11th gen will most likely once again see the removal of hyper-threading on the i7 variants (just like in 9th gen), reduced maximum core/thread count on the i9 chips going from 10C/20T on the latest 10900k to only 8C/16T on the 11900k, as well as out of the box support for memory frequency of 3200Mhz. Oh, and finally, support for PCIe 4.0.

This feels like a major step backwards, not forward. Ryzen chips have supported (out of the box) memory frequencies of 3600Mhz for more than a year now, therefore it barely feels like an impressive benchmark to advertise for a new generation of processors. The same goes for PCIe 4.0. Reducing the maximum amount of cores / threads on i9 variants, with the high possibility of further limiting their i7 range should be considered commercial suicide. Finally, Intel have called for a last minute #branding and #marketing redesign, which to many seems like a mere tactic to simply stay relevant.

Lastly, evaluation of each firm’s share prices summarises this scenario quite well. With AMD, the prices have been surging consistently, while for Intel, with the company losing their 14 year long contract with Apple this year, and stubbornly not addressing their client-base’s requests for architectural upgrades, the story is unfortunately quite different.

I’m hopeful that Intel shift their focus on technical upgrades in the near future, as I’ve been a strong supporter of their chips for a long time now, though in the meantime, it’s time to see whether the grass is truly greener (or redder) on the other side by going with the Ryzen 9 5900X for my next build.