The rivalry between Intel and AMD isn’t going away any time soon, and if anything, it’s getting more intense as a result of the two chipmakers’ significant reorientations toward cutting-edge technology in 2022.
While launching their finest CPUs in years in late 2021 and early 2022, AMD and Intel have adopted two very different strategies to innovate their way past the impending end of Moore’s Law.
In recent years, Intel has had trouble fending off a resurgent AMD. With the release of its Core series CPUs, Intel appeared to have established a sizable lead in the industry, but AMD’s Ryzen processors have reversed the company’s fortunes. As Intel struggled to stay up with Team Red, the top AMD processors started competing head-to-head and even outperforming the greatest Intel CPUs of recent years.
However, Intel shouldn’t be written out because it made a strong comeback with the introduction of its Alder Lake generation of chips, which were constructed using the big.LITTLE chip architecture was invented by ARM and used by Apple in its M1 series SoCs. The company’s manufacturing and design approach has undergone a significant shift with the 12th-gen processors, and suddenly AMD found itself lagging behind.
AMD hasn’t been dormant, though. It has also been exploring new technologies that could help it go to the next stage of innovation, and its research into more unusual chipset designs is showing promise. Its first 3D V-cache processor outperforms Intel’s silicon in the gaming industry, a major source of revenue for all types of computer enterprises.
What effects will these recent advancements have in the next years? Anyone’s guess at this moment, but with the next-generation AMD Zen 4 and Intel Raptor Lake chips in development and scheduled to ship in a reasonably near period, it appears like the competition between AMD and Intel will be even more thrilling than this most recent release.
In our AMD Ryzen 9 5900X review, we mentioned how the 5900X’s pricing increased by $50 (about Php2,500 and above) compared to the Ryzen 9 3900X it replaced. With an MSRP of $799 (roughly Php45,000), the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X is similarly priced to Intel’s newest Alder Lake Core i9-12900K CPU but is significantly more expensive.
As you descend the stack to the Core i7 and Ryzen 7 and the Core i5 and Ryzen 5 CPUs, this is now more or less the pattern. The price difference between an AMD Ryzen processor and an equivalent Intel chip is now small enough that, depending on where you purchase the CPU, you may wind up paying more for an AMD chip than an Intel chip. AMD Ryzen processors are normally cheaper than an analogous Intel chip.
The third generation of AMD Threadripper processors is the greatest option for professional 3D modeling artists, animators, filmmakers, and data scientists if you’re looking for a particularly high-end CPU and have really deep finances.
Because it costs an outrageous $3,499 (Php195,000+), the Threadripper 3990X is out of the price range of most PC gamers and casual PC builders. To help you get the most out of your workday, this CPU is equipped with 64 cores and 128 threads, giving you more than enough power to render 3D models and demolish challenging mathematical models.
The Intel Alder Lake CPUs will serve you well if you’re seeking pure, unadulterated performance. The Core i9-12900K, which beats everything equivalent that AMD is putting out and isn’t even close to, is the most powerful CPU in the consumer class overall.
If we were to compare the two processors on an apples-to-apples basis, as we did in our comparison of the Intel Core i9-12900K and AMD Ryzen 9 5900X, the Ryzen 9 5900X would be less expensive than the Core i9-12900K (and that doesn’t even take into account the new motherboard and cooling you’ll probably need for it).
The 12-core, 24-thread Ryzen 9 5900XT has a maximum boost clock of 4.8GHz and a massive 70MB of cache capacity. Although the Core i9-12900K has 16 cores, only eight of them are performance cores with multiple threads. The remaining eight efficiency cores, which are single-threaded and less powerful, handle all of the background work at a low level. As a result, the performance cores have more time to commit to handling challenging workloads.
Alike to Apple, Intel is taking a similar stance with its next chips. Apple switched to a hybrid design with the M1 processor, which has long powered tablets and mobile phones but is just now making it to mobile and desktop PCs. The big.LITTLE design assigns tasks to appropriate cores based on their priority and processing requirements and employs a combination of performance and efficiency cores. These performance cores are now powerful enough to totally blast through major computational activities like video editing and gaming in ways that weren’t even imaginable a few years ago. This adds a lot of efficiency to the processor by better utilizing its resources (why burn up an entire full-fat threa to poll a keyboard to check whether a key was presse? It’s a waste of energy, and this efficiency is how big.LITTLE chips are able to obtain such remarkable battery life).
It will be fascinating to see how that technology evolves because it appears like AMD is purposefully not moving in that route with its chips. Instead, AMD and semiconductor manufacturer TSMC are working together to develop a 3D chip-stacking method that will give conventional processor chipsets greater verticality. Because of this technology, AMD was able to add a brand-new 3D V-Cache chipset on top of the processor die, expanding the amount of cache memory that was available for the eight processing cores in the Ryzen 7 5800X to produce the Ryzen 7 5800X3D. The end effect is really stunning.
The discussion over AMD vs. Intel, which we’ve been having for years, might become much more nuance and sophisticate as a result of these two distinct technologies. Which have the potential to fundamentally alter how computer processors are create and developed in the future. How these two technologies interact and diverge over the coming years may determine the direction of consumer computing for many years.
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