AMD vs Intel in 2022

So now that that 12th Gen CPUs are out. What would be your choice?

I am contemplating getting either a desktop with the AMD or Intel latest CPUs or wait a while and get a desktop replacement laptop with one of those CPUs and hook it up a large external monitor but the main point here is.... I've seen some initial benchmarks and it seems that the Intel 12th Gen beats AMD in single threaded benchmarks but loses in multi-threaded benchmarks favoring AMD.

Another concern is the Spectre and Meltdown patches do they still affect the 12th Gen CPUs?

 

By the way, is AMD going to release something newer than the Ryzen 5 soon? If they will then that is another win for Intel right now because I don't want to get a computer with an AMD CPU only to have it become yesterware in a couple of months

 

I've built systems with both red and blue. Loong ago it made a difference in the build options based on which one you picked. These days though it doesn't matter as much.

I built an ADL server from the ground up and it's preforming quite well for what I use it for. I didn't put a GPU in it because I don't need or want one for what it's being used for.

ADL offers a couple of niche things right now being DDR5 (can't be bought w/o 10X pricing) and PCIE 5 (nothing on the market yet to utilize the slot). There's also a couple of MOBO's supporting M2 @ Gen 5 single slots when the new drives come out vs having to use a PCI adapter in the slot.

AMD's edge in my book would be PCI bifurcation and more lanes in general if you're playing around with out of the box ideas. i.e. putting in a 8 slot M2 card for really fast storage & capacity

AMD has always run hot in my book and the hype around ADL running hot IME so far isn't true. Air cooled ADL idles the same or better than the 8700K it replaced and under load is a tad cooler.

My feeling / spidey senses put the $ on Intel for awhile at this point since they're more integrated into the processes that keep advancing the tech. They have the only AX/E WIFI cards on the market for example. They pushed PCI Gen 5 and converted TB3 into USB4 w/o demanding royalties like they had been. They have their own fab and can push things out faster than AMD or anyone else right now.

New Iris Xe will be 4X more powerful than current UHD series with 96EU's on board in the CPU package. There releasing the new Alchemist GPU's soon as well. Combining Intel W/ Intel could show some synergies and boosted performance you don't get w/ RTX cards.

Since Intel is behind Frame.Work as well there's a good chance we might be able to buy MOBO/CPU upgrades w/o having to buy a complete new system.

Things are getting more interesting with Intel these days than ever before.

 

Good topic Spartan.

As far as laptops go, I'm not going to pick a side yet as it will all come down to pricing. AMD chips are getting support for USB 4 this year, but a few of the AMD models announced already don't have support for it. So it's going to also come down to particular models too.

In 2021, AMD laptops were cheaper and offered better battery life. Whereas Intel laptops were more expensive but offered 5% better performance, Thunderbolt 4 and PCIE 4 support for SSDs.

Sometimes it was worth paying a little more for Intel, sometimes it wasn't. In the UK, the AMD Legion 7 with a 3080 was £1,999, but the intel variant was £2,799. It's a crazy markup.

I'm looking forward to seeing how the benchmarks are for the new chips. Intel chips should have better battery life now, but we'll have to see how that match up.

As far as desktops go, I've still got a 5950X in my main PC. I don't see my changing that anytime soon as it's a beast. I'm tempted to pick up a new Intel chip for my other PC and relegate the 8700K to a test bench.

 

Zen 4 (aka Ryzen 7000) for desktops isn't going to come out until close to the end of the year. I'm probably going to wait until those benchmarks before deciding. I'm looking at more of a budget/mid-range upgrade to my 9700K and am not at all interested in overclocking. The Core i5 12600 or i7 12700 paired with a B660 or H670 motherboard is looking the most appealing right now.

 

Spectre, Meltdown or even Thunderspy exploits being affected on latest processors is unknown but I don't think we can get any performance uplifts after uCode patches. Furthermore, if OS Sandboxing/containers is enforced globally on all apps by Win 11 then performance will be slower but all of these are mere speculations.
I think its better to wait for benching results of latest Intel and AMD CPUs mobility editions.

 

Agreed. You always have to take the marketing material with a pinch of salt. Apple, Intel, AMD and Nvidia, are all guilty of cherry-picking apps and games that showcase how good their product is.

 

None. Other than a little infrequent video coding on my desktop, my needs are pretty modest, so I can't foresee upgrading for performance in the near future.

 

very interesting year indeed looking at Ryzen 7000 series for a highend desktop build (first desktop ive built for myself in over a decade!)

 

@ jaybee83

I went a couple of decades between my initial build back around 2000. AMD was the choice back then for me and in more recent times switched back to Intel for ease of deployment. Though my most recent build started in 2018. I redid the build using the 8700K ~3 times switching things up with the MOBO / cases as my goals / ideas changed over time. I recently ported things over to ADL 12700K from the ground up due to the arc change on the socket / slots.

If I were to go back to AMD though I'd be aiming more for the AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO but updated for Gen 5 components. I would just want all the yummy bandwidth to play with as new stuff gets released and know there's no bottlenecks anywhere in the system. Being able to do a bit more on the PCI bus than you can w/ Intel comes at a price though. At that point it would be a beast in performance / heat / price. I mean you have 6-8 slots X16 to divvy up w/ 8 NVME drives per slot or HBA's for spinners. The options are a bit limitless to what you can throw into that kind of a system.

 

Indeed, however, AMD's marketing materials seem to have been more consistent with their performance and efficiency increases compared to Intel over the past years.

EDIT: In continuing reply to the OP, if I was to choose a new system... well, as of right now, I'd prefer to wait to see what AMD comes out with and overall benchmarks before making any decisions.

However, Intel's 12th gen series (while powerful) also seem a LOT more energy hungry vs existing AMD cpu's on the market (at least on desktop).. and their upcoming refresh has mainly added 3d cache which seems to be resulting in performance increases without actually touching the clocks or increasing power demands - which is nice... thing is we need to wait just how much of an increase they're going to get.

As of right now, I am still using my PH517-61 laptop with Ryzen 2700 and Vega 56. Seems to be doing allright for everything I use it for (occasional gaming and 3d animation and image editing)... however, one major issue I have is that the software I need to use (3dsMax) has 0 support for AMD GPU rendering.
Radeon Pro Renderer is an option, however, it hadn't been released for Max 2022 (which I'm using), and sometimes its a problem to use RPR because more frequently than not, we really need to use renderers that come pre-built into Max for my classes... and while Quicksilver is ok and can use my GPU, its downside is that is doesn't really do reflections/raytracing and Autodesk hadn't really updated or optimized it that well (and honestly, CPU rendering is dead slow using Arnold for a lot of things).

 

Apple is the worst. They used to always show graphs saying their laptops were beating Intel on performance, then there was an * underneath clarifying they were comparing it to an Intel CPU from two years ago.



Sent from my M2007J3SG using Tapatalk

 

Some tech websites seem to be doing the same when comparing Intel to AMD and I may have seen just one recent article which pitted a modern AMD cpu against a few years old Intel one (mind you, this has less to do with Intel and AMD, and more with tech sites weird choice in hardware).

Although, that 'might' have something to do with the overall chip shortage, but I also had to laugh when Intel was showcasing how 'snappy' Microsoft Office works compared to AMD... whereas in reality, no one would be noticing those improvements (that, and I don't even use MS Office - I'm actually on Libre Office, so the comparison was utterly irrelevant to me and the last time I used MS Office on my system, it had 0 issues in terms of snappiness, responsiveness, opening or closing documents).

 

If I build/buy a new system this year, it will most likely be AMD. Although unlike in 2021 when it was a foregone conclusion comparing Zen 3 to Rocket Lake - IMO Rocket Lake was Intel's equivalent of the FX 9590, i.e. turn the clocks and power draw up to maximum, heat a small house all by itself - my early impressions of Alder Lake are that maybe Intel is finally turning a corner with 10nm, and may be somewhat competitive again.

I'd also be looking primarily as desktop; my desktop is a Core i5 2500k from 2011, whereas my laptop is a much newer i7-8750H from 2018. I see little reason to consider replacing the laptop at this point, whereas on the desktop it's at the point where another GPU upgrade on a 2011 CPU doesn't really make sense. Although a GPU upgrade in general doesn't make sense right now, so I'm planning to wait for AMD5 and DDR5 before upgrading it, assuming everything keeps working.

Thus, plan A: Wait for AM5/DDR5, upgrade end of the year or next year. Plan B, something fails tomorrow: Buy Ryzen 5000, hex or quad. Plan C, something fails in six months... that's where Intel may have a chance, if Alder Lake is being the real deal.

I agree with Deks that AMD has been very accurate in their performance improvement claims since Ryzen debuted. They quote average performance uplifts (unlike Apple, who quotes best-case "up to" figures), and their averages have proven to be very close to review site averages relative to their previous generation. So while I'm still not going to preorder, they've gotten to the point that if they say "Zen 4 is gong to be 14% better than Zen 3", I'm probably going to take that into account when deciding whether to wait for Zen 4 or buy Zen 3/Alder Lake.

I'm not sure how reliable Intel's marketing figures are since for the past several generations I've been checking whether their power efficiency is in the right ballpark yet, and since it wasn't until Alder Lake I wasn't bothering to read the rest of the review.

 

@ Sandy Bridge

I built an ADL setup w/o a GPU and I'm happy with it. I skipped 10/11th gen because there wasn't any significant tech additions to the board or the CPU.

ADL opens the door to DDR5 / PCI5 and there's a couple of select boards that have a M2 slot that's gen 5 pushing 128gbps.

AMD is behind the 8 ball though right now but, the doors are opening up slowly to be competitive with TB converting to royalty free USB4.

The "nm" sizing of the fab process doesn't make for a better buy it's the tech that's crammed into that space. Going to a hybrid arch on ADL allows Intel to blow the doors off of everything currently on the market. IIRC AMD is already doing 7nm or 5nm on their chips but still slipping in the performance dept. There are pro/con's to either side though.

If you want to get into bifurcation on the PCI slots for interesting applications then you need a X299 for Intel but, AMD offers it w/ most boards. Along with unleashing the PCI lanes under AMD gice you some more options on how you want to use them.

It comes down to the fine print and use case with either. Building out a system is the sum of its parts. If you want high speed data options or multi-GPU then AMD opens doors to things like M2 cards that can be slotted in PCI slots up to 8 drives/card. If you're going for storage in general to hoard files it can be a toss up though if you plan things right. If you're going for app performance ADL, games ADL, and so on. Some of the heavy lifting such as using an RTX card though works in either system.

The MOBO options make a difference though too. The specs on them vary quite a bit if you're not paying attn you shoot yourself in the foot missing out on some niche options that might be valuable once HW catches up with the abilities of the boars/chipsets.

Priorities.

 

I think AMD is at 7nm on desktop and 6nm on laptops, although the latter might be as of February.

From what I've read, you're probably right that for most things, Alder Lake is ahead right now. But I'd have to read more articles to be convinced after all of Intel's huffing and puffing about being the best for the last few generations when outside of perhaps AVX512, they really weren't unless you had tons of free power and needed some extra heat. Which is why if I needed one tomorrow, I'd go with the known-good Ryzen 5800X (or if it was out of stock, 5600X).

My only particularly "fancy" want-list items are being able to run a PCIe card at 16 and another at x4 (rather than a second one taking them both down to x8 as on my current mobo), and having plenty of storage connections, including SATA. I'm still using USB 3.0 Type-A for everything except my Vive (which is 3.1 Gen II Type A, IIRC), don't have any m.2 drives yet so anything will be faster than my current SSDs, and am not going to run multiple GPUs. I mainly care about DDR5 so I can skip a generation on desktop and thus be able to re-use the RAM if I do have a need to upgrade in 2026 for some reason.

Although over the course of a decade, I could see myself making use of a bunch of M2 drives slotted into PCI Express slots as I add storage. That could be my 2020s replacement for adding a bunch of 3.5" SATA drives, and I've already considered adding an M.2 drive to my 2011 desktop via PCI Express - something that might yet happen.

I don't think I've looked at ADL iGPU performance. Honestly, for 98% of what I do, a good iGPU would probably be adequate, and even if GPU prices come back to normal, there's a chance that I'll just keep using my RX 480 until iGPUs catch up and then switch to them. Though again, iGPU is an area where it'll take awhile for Intel to gain my trust, since they've been so far behind AMD for so long and don't have the greatest driver reputation, either (not that AMD does either, but still... I know the pain points of AMD graphics drivers, I'd have to learn new pain points with Intel ones).

 

DDR5 is a bunch of hype right now and over priced 2-3X DDR4.

With bifurcation in the BIOS on some boards you can select how you want to split the lanes. ADL has 20 lanes off the CPU and the new DMI is 2X as fast for ancillary items.

Plenty of SATA is my concern as well since I'm running 5 spinners + NVME's. Most boards have 6-8 SATA ports built in but, a HBA for additional ports is cheap and easy for under $50 for 6-8 more ports per card. If you want to get fancy a raid card in pass through mode can yield 4 drives per cable that fans out.

There are quite a few PCI options for adding an NVME to older systems on the cheap.

I transcode video files using just the iGPU on my server for Plex recordings / removing commercials in seconds. When I started my "server" adventure I tried to get Plex to use a dGPU for processing and that only works for Windows and not Linux which is more useful for the features I designed into the box. I'm running it a Router / WIFI / Firewall / DVR and some other things but, those are the primary functions. Running it as a router though opens the door to faster speeds than you see on the black boxes from Best Buy for ~$500-$600. I can get line speed bandwidth using a VPN w/ WireGuard and those little black boxes tend to top out at 500mbps w/ VPN which isn't acceptable on a 1 Gigabit line.

AMD / NVIDIA / Intel... they all have driver issues. I don't bother with most of the updates at this point beyond getting it working and then locking out the updates. There's no reason to be downloading 1GB of drivers every month for no improvement.