This has always been in the thought of a gamer who is set to buy his laptop. But in many cases, the answer is actually very clear. In fact, for most users, it’s a blowout win in AMD’s favor, That’s an amazing reversal of fortunes for the chipmaker after it teetered on the edge of bankruptcy a mere four years ago, making its turnaround all the more impressive as it continues to upset the entrenched Intel after it enjoyed a decade of dominance.
This article covers the never-ending argument of AMD vs Intel desktop CPUs (we’re not covering laptop or server chips) based on what you plan to do with your PC, pricing, performance, driver support, power consumption, and security, giving us a clear view of the state of the competition. We’ll also discuss the lithographies and architectures that influence the moving goalposts. Overall, there’s a clear winner, but which CPU brand you should buy depends mostly on what kind of features, price, and performance are important to you. but the landscape has certainly changed in the wake of AMD’s Ryzen 5000 launch. AMD’s newest processors, the Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 9 5900X, not to mention the Ryzen 5 5600X, upset the entire mainstream desktop lineup. You can head to our expansive in-depth coverage of the Ryzen 5000 series, including pricing, benchmarks, and availability
Intel fired back with its Rocket Lake processors, and they certainly put pressure on the Ryzen 5000 lineup. Rocket Lake brings a 19% IPC improvement and high clock speeds that stretch up to 5.3 GHz with the flagship Core i9-11900K, but the chips still come etched on the aging 14nm process. That means the new chips top out at eight cores as opposed to the ten cores found with Intel’s previous-gen chips. Surprisingly, the Willow Cove architecture’s explosive IPC gains helped Intel shrink the performance gap with AMD, and in some cases wrest away key wins in important price brackets.
