Intel vs AMD

Intel (Integrated Electronics Corporation) is the world's largest CPU manufacturer. It was founded in 1968 and is based in Santa Clara, California (US). Intel is the creator of the x86 CPU architecture which is now used in the majority of PCs (and since 2006 Macs as well). Intel's domination in the x86 CPU market led to charges of antitrust violations in US, EU, Japan and South Korea over the years.

AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) was founded in 1969 and is based in Sunnyvale, California (US). It is the second largest supplier of x86 architecture CPUs and, after a merger with ATI in 2006, the third largest manufacturer of GPUs (after Intel and nVidia). It is considered the underdog of the CPU market due to revenue and market share several times smaller than Intel's (19% in 2009 Q4 vs Intel's 80%).

Both AMD and Intel came out with a lot of great CPUs throughout the years. We could observe the competition between Pentium vs K5, Pentium 2 vs K6, Pentium 3 vs K6-3, Celeron vs Duron and so on. Back then it was all about the clock rate of the CPU, but it all changed with Pentium vs Athlon XP competition which started in 2000. Intel could clock their P4s higher while AMD could deliver better performance per clock.

For example, a 2 GHz Athlon XP would easily outperform a 2 GHz Pentium IV; however, the P4 could run at higher clock speeds due to it's architecture. Intel used the bigger numbers in marketing to great effect. As such, AMD adopted a "performance rating" for their CPUs rather than raw gigahertz.. Ironically, Intel soon reached a limit on P4's clock speed and switched to a Performance Rating system themselves, thus ending the "MHz wars".

AMD was the first to introduce a 64-bit processor targeted at an average consumer in 2003. Intel soon followed; nowadays all modern CPUs can run 64-bit applications, while being backwards-compatible with 32-bit ones. For an average user the most noticeable benefit is being able to use 4 GB and more RAM (32-bit systems can only address up to 3.25 GB).

Both companies soon started looking for other ways to increase performance rather than raising clock speeds. In 2005, AMD released the first Athlon 64 X2 dual core processors and surpassed Intel in US retail sales for some time. Intel released dual core Pentium D, later followed by a new Intel Core series (Core 2 Duo, Core i3, Core i5 and Core i7). AMD continued their dual core Athlon X2 CPU line and the quad core Phenom (which wasn't very successful at all), later followed by a much improved Phenom II.

So how do you decide whether an AMD or Intel processor is better now? Your best bet would be to check the benchmarks on popular hardware sites. Neither the raw MHz nor the number of cores will tell you exactly how fast the CPU will perform!

• 2010 Desktop CPU Charts on TomsHardware is probably the biggest collection of the newest CPU reviews and benchmarks using games and various applications in one place.


• PassMark Software site has a huge number of graphs with the latest AMD vs Intel benchmarks. Note, however, that these are results of a synthetic benchmark and don't necessarily indicate how well will the CPU run the "real world" applications.


• Xbit Labs regularly post new CPU benchmarks, reviews, tests and overclocking guides.


• Newegg is one of the best places to buy computer hardware. More importantly, you can read CPU reviews from real people like yourself instead of relying just on the big computer hardware review sites.