The rivalry between the two companies has heated up dramatically since AMD released it’s line up of Ryzen processors. Promising blistering performance without breaking the bank. Have AMD delivered on these claims? Let’s find out.
Wait, what happened to AMD?
Intel has dominated the CPU Market since the mid-2000s. In the early days of Computing AMD and Intel were often trading place when it came to straight up performance but then Intel took the lead and has kept hold of it ever since. AMD was always falling behind quite significantly and were never able to keep up with Intel’s offerings.
This all changed when AMD released their 1st Generation Ryzen chips. Offering High core count, hyper-threading and good clock speeds. Benchmarks began to appear showing AMD leaping ahead of their Intel Rivals in Multi-threaded tasks and giving some competitive gaming results (although Intel’s equivalent always came out on top).
The AMD Revival
The release of Ryzen prompted Intel to respond with more cores at the same price point. Proving to be a win-win for consumers. AMD forced Intel to deliver better products at a better price. Delivering more cores and even hyper-threading on some of their consumer CPUs. Intel’s consumer flagship at the time, the i7 7700k was dwarfed by the specs of its new Rival the Ryzen 1700X which offered 8 Cores against Intel’s 4. The i7 was and still is a monster of a CPU, especially when it comes down to raw gaming performance. However, when it comes down to large workloads it couldn’t compete with the 1700X offering in the region of 60% increase in performance during multi-threaded workloads.
It’s no lie that Intel still holds the crown for outright single core performance. The Intel chips can reach frequencies completely out of the ballpark for any of the current AMD chips but this is something AMD is still working on. The 3rd Generation Ryzen’s are going to be based on a 7nm Architecture, this should mean that the base clock speed should increase quite dramatically.
Conclusion
Although I don’t see AMD taking the crown from Intel when it comes to gaming performance, I can see AMD steadily chipping away at Intel's market share in the Enterprise and consumer markets. AMD’s offerings aren’t trumping what Intel offers at the high end but when it comes down to price vs performance AMD wins hands down.
Whether you’re in Intel fan or AMD fan, competition is always healthy in a free market. Ultimately we, the consumers, will be the winners in this war.
Network Engineer
Steve is one of our Network Engineers. He was born and raised in Crawley, West Sussex. After completing his GCSE’s he found a job as a Domestic IT Technician for an independent Computer Repair company in Redhill. This saw him travelling around Surrey and West Sussex repairing people’s PCs, laptops, Macs and even the odd mobile phone.