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RSS FeedAMD vs. Intel: Who makes the better processor?
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| AMD | 49% | 76 votes | Total: 155 votes | |
| Intel | 51% | 79 votes |
AMD
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Add to FavoritesBeing in the computer business years ago, this writer found it difficult to stay in "touch" with the computer technology industry as it went and still goes through many changes today. It is not each month or each year, but nearly everyday, the computer industry seems to go through a metamorphosis that baffles even the minds of the layperson who has no idea even how to turn a computer on. At the same time, the competitiveness is extremely high between computer system manufacturers, the "big boys" in the retail end of the computer industry as well as the "mom and pop" shops that sell computers, software and peripherals. At the forefront of the computer manufacturing industry is not only the competitiveness between the MACINTOSH Computers and the PC, but between the chip manufacturers, AMD and INTEL. Both are good, but this writer has to believe and does believe that AMD has a competitive edge over Intel because it is a better made processor.
Intel has been in the computer processor manufacturing business for many years and has been the big name of the processor industry. However, this writer who has had the pleasure of being a value added reseller for many computer products, computer systems and software for nearly seven years, has found that the computers that he had sold and the motherboards that he sold with the Intel processor on them were a bit more quirkier than anything he had sold on with AMD processors on them. The Intel computers were found the be somewhat slower and would lock up or crash more often than any computers sold with the AMD processor. This does not mean that this writer would not sell a computer with the Intel processor in it, but he would prefer the AMD over the INTEL. At the same time, what was interesting was the difficulty in convincing customers/clients that the AMD was better and more stable than the INTEL. The only way that this writer was able to do this convincing was to bring two computers on-site to the customers/clients and show them which computer ran the best.
At the same time, this writer had to convince himself that the AMD ran smoother and with less problems than the INTEL processor. How did he do this? Easy, with the help of his partner, they would set up a work bench and with only the motherboard, memory, video card and a sound card plugged into their respective slots and then plugging into a monitor with the assistance of a mouse and a keyboard, the benchmarking began. Each and every time, the AMD would benchmark stronger and crashed less. However, one of the main "ingredients" to look at and this writer did it was to figure out which was better for what application.
It turned out that for gaming purposes, and back in the mid-90s to late 90s, games were not as strong as they are today. Still, it appeared that the AMD allowed for game play to continue uninterrupted for hours at a time. What was nice for both processors was that word processing and database management only, both processors worked great, however, in the view of this writer, there were still less problems with the AMD processor.
What really did it for this writer was the introduction of the INTEL Celeron Processor. This writer believes that the Celeron was not the greatest move for INTEL, yet, it was the less expensive option for those individuals who needed to spend less on their computer needs. AMD took this and ran with it and introduced newer and more advanced processors. Yet, still, INTEL remained the bigger name in the processor manufacturing market and this was and still is due to marketing and advertising.
Finally, when it comes to buying computers, this writer will continue to purchase computers that have the AMD label and logo on it because he is convinced that it is still the more reliable one on the market today.
Learn more about this author, David Brown.
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Intel
Not too long ago, Intel's demise was becoming more imminent. AMD had just released the Athlon 64, with 64-bit capabilities and an integrated memory controller that increased the memory bandwidth the chip could receive, reducing the memory bottleneck between the memory and the chip. The Pentium 4 was hot, produced a lot of heat, and the clock speed of the chip just couldn't be pushed as far as was expected. AMD ruled the market, and Intel lost its position as the leader of innovation. That is when it all changed.
Knowing that it didn't want to be second place, Intel quickly released the highly successful Core micro-architecture, which had multiple cores under a single heat spreader. This architecture was also much more parallel, so many more applications and data could be handled at the same time with little to no slowdown. The chips were also much more energy efficient, using much less power and producing lots less heat. In order to have a speedy Intel processor you didn't have to have a huge fan setup that made a lot of noise. The Core micro-architecture was very sucessful, and was superior in performance to AMD's offerings. It was so successful in fact that Intel released the Core 2 architecture, an improved chip design that further increased parallelism and clock speeds while keeping a high efficiency. AMD held on to the market, but the tide of Intel dominance was coming in and AMD couldn't stop it.
It is really surprising that the Core and Core 2 chips actually had superior performance, because like Intel's older chips it had to have an external memory controller to access the computer's RAM, or memory. This theoretically increased the time it took to access memory and should've reduced the performance of the chips, but somehow the Core chips were efficient enough to still beat AMD's chips, even though they had integrated memory controllers that increased memory bandwidth. AMD jumped ahead in technology, having integrated memory controllers and multiple cores on a single die, and even had the cores communicate with each other through a separate data link, called the Hyper-transport bus. All these features were supposed to increased the performance of AMD's chips, and it did, but somehow Intel was still able to take the lead in performance, ever improving the efficiency of their Core 2 chips. The old tech seemed to still have plenty of life in it compared to the new tech AMD was trying to show off.
AMD just recently released the Phenom processor, which has four cores on the same die, meaning all four cores are made on the same silicon, while Intel makes a quad-core chip by joining two dual-core chips together by the front-side-bus. AMD said that a natural quad-core, as it is called, would be much more efficient than the way Intel manufactures theirs. The cores would communicate through the Hyper-transport bus, instead of through the much slower front-side-bus, increasing performance. Well guess what, Phenom came out and was perfectly underwhelming. All of AMD's efforts were unsucessful to take the high-performance crowd, and soon the prices of Phenom chips plummeted, being better suited at competing with Intel's middle or low-performance chips. What's worse is that a natural quad-core severely decreased AMD's chip yields, so AMD tried to sell defective quad-cores as tri-cores, which consumers simply didn't want.
Intel, despite still having a performance advantage, has finally decided to move on. Intel has very recently released the Nehalem chips, with the official name being Core i-7 (i-7 does not mean anything in particular). This chip is finally the first of Intel's to have its own integrated memory controller and has its own version of Hyper-transport, called the Quickpath interconnect. The reason Intel all of a sudden thinks these technologies are worth including in their chips? Bandwidth and further parallelism so Intel can efficiently manufacture chips with more and more cores. The new i-7 chips have been benchmarked and show an average of 15-20 percent performance increases over the former performance king, one of Intel's previous chips.
It seems that the success of the Athlon 64 and the relative failure of the Pentium 4 has stirred up a determination in Intel, a determination to never be behind the performance curve. Ever since the Core micro-architecture was released, Intel has stolen the performance crown and continues to have the best high-end processors. Maybe AMD can turn things around in the future, but now Intel is king.
Learn more about this author, B. Ender.
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