AMD vs Intel: Which CPUs Are Better in 2022?

If you’re looking for the best CPUs for Gaming or the best workstation CPU, there are only two choices to pick from – AMD and Intel. That fact has spawned an almost religious following for both camps, and the resulting AMD vs Intel flamewars make it tricky to get unbiased advice about the best choice for your next processor. But in many cases, the answer is actually very clear. In fact, for most users, it’s now a blowout win in Intel’s favor, as you can see in our CPU Benchmarks Hierarchy. That’s a fast reversal of fortunes for the chipmaker after its decade of dominance was completely overturned by AMD’s Ryzen 5000 chips. It also gives Intel a leg up as we head into the Raptor Lake and Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 era.

This article covers the never-ending argument of AMD vs Intel desktop CPUs (we’re not covering laptop or server chips). We judge the chips on seven criteria 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.

If you’re looking for the fastest overall chips on the market, you should look to Intel’s potent new Alder Lake series. Even though AMD clings to the distinction of having the single fastest gaming chip available, Intel’s Alder Lake chips take the gaming crown from AMD in all of the most important price bands. Alder Lake also rivals or beats AMD in all meaningful performance metrics, like single- and multi-threaded productivity workloads. You can see the disruptive results in our Intel Core i9-12900K and Core i5-12600K review, and we’ve also added both our Windows 10 and 11 testing to our CPU benchmark database. We’ve also thrown in results with both DDR4 and DDR5 memory for good measure. 

Intel’s Alder Lake has completely redefined x86 desktop PC chips with a new hybrid architecture that delivers amazing levels of performance. Not to be upstaged, AMD released its Ryzen 7 5800X3D, a new CPU with 3D V-Cache. This chip takes the overall leadership spot for gaming, if only by a slight percentage, courtesy of an almost-unthinkable 96MB of L3 cache bolted onto the souped-up processor.

You can see how all of these processors stack up in our AMD vs Intel CPU Benchmarks Hierarchy, but the landscape had changed in the wake of AMD’s Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 9 5900X, not to mention the Ryzen 5 5600X. At their debut, the Ryzen 5000 series were the highest-performing chips on the market and beat Intel in every metric that matters, including gaming, application performance, power consumption, and thermals, but Intel’s successful Alder Lake counterattack swung the tables in Team Blue’s favor.

AMD recently released six other new Zen 3 chips to shore up its defenses against Alder Lake, but we’ve found that they don’t impact the competitive positioning much. AMD also has its Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 chips coming before the end of the year. That means the AMD vs Intel battle could shift towards the tail end of the year, but this is the tale of the tape for the current state of the market. 

AMD vs. Intel: Which CPU is Best?

Here are the results of our analysis and testing. In the following sections, we’ll go over the in-depth details of how we came to our conclusions for each category.

AMD’s relentless onslaught with its Zen-based processors has redefined our expectations for both the mainstream desktop and the HEDT markets, originally catching Intel flatfooted as it remained mired on the 14nm process and Skylake architectures. The past several years have seen AMD CPUs go from value-focused and power hungry chips to leading-end designs that deliver more cores, more performance, and lower power requirements.

Intel fought back by slowly adding features and cores across its product stack, but that also resulted in negative side effects, like more power consumption and heat generation. That only served to highlight the company’s struggles on the design and fabrication side of its operation.

The AMD vs Intel CPU conversation has changed entirely, though, as Intel has now undercut AMD’s price-to-performance ratio entirely with the Alder Lake chips. Additionally, Alder Lake comes with the most disruptive change to Intel’s CPU overall SoC design methodology, not to mention core architectures, that we’ve seen in a decade. They also come with the new ‘Intel 7’ process that has proven to be exceptionally competitive, particularly against AMD’s superior process node that comes from TSMC. That shifted our rankings from a 7-to-4 advantage for AMD to a 7-to-5 advantage in Intel’s favor.

Intel even moved forward to PCIe 5.0 and DDR5 technologies, leaving AMD’s PCIe 4.0 and DDR4 support looking rather dated. DDR5 does add significant cost to motherboards, but Alder Lake also supports DDR4 memory. However, Intel still hasn’t eased its draconian segmentation policies that limit features, like overclockability, to pricey chips and motherboards.

Intel’s Alder Lake also holds the crown on overclockability. If you spend the cash on a Z690 motherboard, you’ll attain far more overclocking headroom than you’ll get with the Ryzen 5000 chips. You can see our head-to-head testing in our How to Overclock 12th Gen Intel Alder Lake CPUs feature.

AMD’s current mix of price, performance, and value, recently resulted in deep price cuts to its flagship Ryzen 5000 processors. AMD isn’t taking the challenge lying down, though, as it recently released its Ryzen 7 5800X3D, a new CPU with 3D V-Cache. This chip takes the overall leadership spot for gaming courtesy of an incredible 96MB of L3 cache bolted onto the souped-up specialized processor that delivers up to 15% more gaming performance on average. However, it still features the Zen 3 architecture, so it lags Intel’s processors in more general desktop PC application performance.

Despite AMD’s recent refresh, Intel wins the CPU war overall right now. An AMD processor could still be the better choice depending on your needs, like if you prize the lowest power consumption or less-expensive motherboards. For now, if you want the best in gaming or application performance, overclocking or software support, or if you want productivity performance without buying a discrete GPU, Team Blue deserves your hard-earned dollars.  

AMD vs Intel CPU Pricing and Value

Pricing is the most important consideration for almost everyone, and AMD has generally been hard to beat in the value department. The company offers a plethora of advantages, like full overclockability on most models, not to mention complimentary software that includes the innovative Precision Boost Overdrive (PBO) auto-overclocking feature. At first, the company’s Ryzen 5000 series processors brought an across-the-board $50 price hike, but the faster chips earned their higher price tags. That calculus has changed now that Intel’s Alder Lake chips have retaken the performance crown and have brutally competitive pricing, thus forcing price cuts from AMD.

You also benefit from the broad compatibility of motherboards with the AM4 CPU socket that supports both forward and backward compatibility, ensuring that not only do you get the most bang for your processor buck, but also your motherboard investment (there are caveats with the 5000 series). However, AMD’s long-lived support for the AM4 socket now finds it trailing in connectivity options while Intel’s chipsets have more modern amenities. The company’s new AM5 socket will arrive with the Ryzen 7000 chips later this year, but AMD says we can expect the AM4 socket to thrive for quite some time.

AMD also allows overclocking on all but its A-Series motherboards (see our article on how to overclock AMD Ryzen), which is a boon for enthusiasts. And, in this battle of AMD vs Intel CPUs, we haven’t even discussed the actual silicon yet. 

The arrival of Intel’s Alder Lake-S models has found the company adding more cores, threads, and features to its mainstream lineup, but without increased gen-on-gen pricing for similar models. That equated to a substantial reduction in price-per-core and price-per-thread metrics, allowing it to steal the value crown from AMD in the Core i3, i5, i7, and i9 ranges. The addition of the hybrid x86 architecture, which brings a mix of high-performance and efficiency cores, has also wrung out more performance. Meanwhile, AMD still owns the high end desktop (HEDT) segment entirely with its Threadripper processors — but it is noteworthy that we haven’t seen new HEDT chips from either chipmaker over the last few years.

Intel includes bundled coolers with its non-overclocking SKUs (you have to pay more to overclock), but they are flimsy and ‘good enough,’ at best. We’ve even seen cases where Intel’s stock coolers don’t provide full performance at stock settings. Intel did slightly bulk up its bundled coolers, but the aesthetic and slight thermal improvements aren’t enough to match AMD’s competent coolers, and they aren’t available on all models.

Intel also doesn’t throw in a cooler at all for its pricey overclockable K-series SKUs (see our article on how to overclock an Intel CPU). So be sure to budget in a cooler (and a beefy one at that) if you plan on overclocking an Intel processor. Meanwhile, most of AMD’s bundled coolers are suitable for at least moderate overclocking. Still, those only came as a standard add-in with the previous-gen Ryzen 3000 series, most of which haven’t been supplanted with new Ryzen 5000 equivalents yet. Moreover, only three of the first seven AMD Ryzen 5000 processors, the Ryzen 5 5600X, Ryzen 7 5700G, and Ryzen 5 5600G, come with a bundled cooler.

Intel not only charges a premium for its overclockable K-Series chips, but you’ll also need to shell out for a pricey Z-Series motherboard for the privilege of overclocking your processor — Intel doesn’t allow full overclocking on B- or H-series motherboards. However, Intel has now enabled memory overclocking on its B560 and H570 chipsets, a big win for enthusiasts.

Intel also has a long history of rapid socket transitions, meaning the odds of dropping a new chip into your existing motherboard, or taking the older processor over to a newer board, aren’t as high. Intel’s Socket 1700 for Alder Lake will extend for at least one more generation, but plan for limited forward and backward compatibility on the Intel side.

AMD’s Zen 3 chips are the end of the line for the tried-and-true AM4 socket, so you shouldn’t expect those chips to work in future AMD platforms. However, AMD has its new CPUs with 3D V-Cache headed to production later this year. Zen 4 processors will come with a new AM5 socket, but AMD plans for it to have a similarly-long lifespan as the AM4 socket.

Win: Tie. When you’re comparing Intel vs AMD CPUs, Team Red still has a compelling value story across the full breadth of its product stack, but Intel’s Alder Lake currently offers the most bang for your buck. However, that is only when we take chip pricing into account. Intel’s decision to support PCIe 5.0 and DDR5 with Alder Lake has resulted in increased motherboard pricing, so those price differences can offset each other in certain price bands. Intel still holds the overall price-to-performance advantage, though, even when we factor in motherboard pricing. Of course, you can also opt for DDR4 motherboards to avoid the DDR5 tax.

If you’re looking for integrated graphics paired with a processor with more than eight cores, Intel is currently your only choice for chips at retail. AMD does have its ‘Cezanne’ Ryzen 5 5600G and Ryzen 7 5700G APUs with integrated graphics. However, these chips come with pared-back CPU performance in exchange for beefy integrated graphics, meaning they won’t offer nearly the same level of performance in CPU-centric tasks.

Not that we’d recommend integrated graphics for most users, particularly if you’re interested in gaming—check out our recent comparison of integrated graphics on AMD and Intel processors for more detail. 

AMD vs Intel CPU Gaming Performance

In the AMD vs Intel CPU battle, Intel holds the lead in all critical price bands. Below we have a wide selection of collective gaming performance measurements for the existing chips in the different price bands. In addition, we have two series of test results below that encapsulate performance in both Windows 10 and Windows 11 because Intel’s Alder Lake offers more performance in Windows 10 than 11. Regardless, the Blue Team holds the lead in both operating systems. You can see a much more holistic view in our CPU Benchmarks Hierarchy. 

Our first four slides encapsulate Windows 11 gaming performance with the new Alder Lake and Ryzen 5000 processors included, while the Windows 10 slides show a larger selection of processors.

As you can see, Intel’s Alder Lake chips are faster than AMD’s Zen 3-powered Ryzen 5000 processors in all areas but one — the Ryzen 7 5800X3D that takes the overall lead in gaming. However, you have to be aware of the tradeoffs with this highly-specialized chip — the 3D V-Cache doesn’t boost performance in all games, though we found that it impacted nearly every single game we tested. Additionally, the Ryzen 7 5800X3D is optimized specifically for gaming, but as you’ll see below, it can’t keep pace with similarly-priced chips in productivity applications.

That said, while the Ryzen 7 5800X3D is faster than Intel’s Core i9-12900KS, even after overclocking, most users would be hard-pressed to notice the difference between the two in real-world gaming sessions unless they’re doing multiple other tasks at the same time, like gaming.

The Core i9-12900K and Core i9-12900KS slot in as Intel’s fastest gaming chips, price be damned, but the Core i7-12700K delivers basically the same gaming performance for far less cash, making it the go-to choice for performance addicts. For mainstream gamers, the Core i5-12600K offers the best blend of price and performance that you can find on the market, bar none. The Core i5-12400 offers stellar performance for its price, and the Core i3-12100 is the chip to beat in the ~$110 price class.

The Ryzen 9 5900X slots in as AMD’s second-fastest fastest gaming chip, but not by much. The Ryzen 5 5600X offers nearly the same level of performance at a friendlier $300 price point, and AMD’s Ryzen 7 5700X represents a small step up the ladder over the 5600X.

We have in-depth head-to-head comparisons for Alder Lake against Ryzen 5000 in each of the key price brackets in the following articles: 

However, bear in mind that the performance delta between Intel and AMD’s comparably-priced chips often isn’t worth paying a huge premium, at least for the vast majority of enthusiasts. You’d be hard-pressed to notice the small differences in gaming performance at the top of the AMD vs Intel stack, but things are more complicated in the mid-range.

You’ll need a fire-breathing high-end GPU and one of the best gaming monitors with a high refresh rate to get the most out of a small performance advantage, and you’ll need to game at the mundane 1080p resolution, too. Kicking your resolution up to 1440p and beyond typically pushes the bottleneck back to the GPU, so you won’t gain as much from your CPU’s gaming prowess. However, a bit of extra CPU gaming performance could pay off if you plan on updating your graphics card with a newer generation while keeping the rest of your system intact. We expect most builds in the mid-range to come with lesser GPUs, which generally serve as an equalizer in terms of CPU performance.

In terms of integrated graphics performance, there’s no beating AMD. The company’s current-gen Cezanne APUs offer the best performance available from integrated graphics with the Ryzen 7 5700G and Ryzen 5 5600G. Hit those reviews for a dedicated breakdown, or head to our CPU Benchmark hierarchy for even more detail.

Winner: Intel. Intel’s Alder Lake chips have wrested the gaming crown from AMD in the critical price bands. AMD has the overall lead with the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, but that chip comes with a string of caveats that you should be aware of if you plan on the upgrade — the cache doesn’t accelerate all games and it also doesn’t impact performance in applications. That said, taken as a whole, both companies have extremely competitive chips in the respective price ranges — you’ll often be hard-pressed to notice a difference between them in real-world gaming.

If you’re a gaming fanatic that prizes every single last frame you can squeeze out in the broadest range of titles, Intel’s Core i9-12900K is the answer on the high-end, and that will also pay off if you plan to upgrade your GPU soon. If you’re looking for a lower-priced chip that offers the same gaming performance but exchanges some heft in productivity applications for a lower price tag, the Core i7-12700K is your chip. For the vast majority, the Core i5-12600K offers the best blend of price and performance, making it the uncontested best CPU for gaming. 

AMD vs Intel Productivity and Content Creation Performance

In the non-gaming performance battle of AMD vs Intel CPUs, Intel’s Alder Lake chips have also made great strides against AMD’s finest and offer a superior price-to-performance ratio in a broad swath of workloads. That said, AMD’s highest-end chip takes the outright win in terms of the ultimate performance in threaded productivity and content creation applications in a few workloads. That comes courtesy of its copious slathering of cores, threads, and cache on its flagship Ryzen 9 5950X. However, those wins come at the expense of a much higher price point, and it isn’t enough to justify the premium.

Alder Lake marks the debut of a mixture of two types of cores for the mainstream desktop PC. The big performance cores (P-cores) are best for latency-sensitive work, giving Intel the uncontested lead in single-threaded applications. The efficiency cores (E-cores) step in to add some additional heft in threaded and background applications, which pays big dividends in heavily-threaded content creation and productivity applications. The E-cores have proven to be the unsung hero for Alder Lake in creativity and productivity workloads, allowing Intel to take the lead from AMD in the most important pricing bands.

Solid performance in single-threaded work equates to faster performance in all manner of workloads, particularly day-to-day applications that rely on snappy responsiveness from the processor. The Alder Lake Core i9-12900K has taken the uncontested lead in single-threaded performance across the full spate of our benchmarks, but that’s Intel’s most expensive mainstream CPU. If you’re on the hunt for snappy single-threaded performance, the other Alder Lake processors also take comparatively large leads over competing AMD processors. That means Intel’s Alder Lake family holds the single-threaded performance crown. 

Winner: Intel. For professionals on the hunt for performance in content creation and productivity applications, the winner of AMD vs Intel CPUs goes to Intel on the strength of its x86 hybrid architecture. This new design blends two types of cores to create a single powerhouse processor architecture that’s just as agile in single-threaded work as it is powerful in threaded applications. 

AMD vs Intel Processor Specifications and Features

AMD has its Ryzen 3, Ryzen 5, Ryzen 7, Ryzen 9, and Threadripper lines, while Intel breaks its offerings up into the Core i3, Core i5, Core i7, Core i9, and Cascade Lake-X families. To compare Intel vs AMD CPUs based on specs and features, we could chart the entire product stacks, but for the sake of brevity, we’ll focus on the top chips in the respective families. Be aware that both companies have value options within each tier, but we can get a general sense of the current competitive landscape with these (relatively) short lists. We’re using both vendors’ recommended pricing and street pricing to give you a sense of the current state of the market.

The high end desktop (HEDT) is the land of creative prosumers with fire-breathing multi-core monsters for just about every need. Intel has long enjoyed the uncontested lead in this segment, but while AMD’s first-gen Threadripper lineup disrupted the status quo, the Threadripper 3000 lineup destroyed it.

Here we can see that when it comes to AMD vs Intel HEDT CPUs, AMD holds the uncontested lead with 64 cores and 128 threads in its flagship Threadripper 3990X, and the 32- and 24-core Threadripper 3970X and 3960X models cement the overwhelming lead over Intel’s chips.

Intel splits its highest-end lineup into two classes, with the Xeon W-3175X and W-3265 dropping into exotic LGA3647 motherboards that carry eye-watering price tags to match the chips’ insane pricing. These aren’t really enthusiast-class systems, though; think of these as more for the professional workstation market. 

Intel’s HEDT lineup truly begins with its 18-core Cascade Lake-X Core i9-10980XE that drops into existing LGA2066 motherboards. The chip is powerful given its price point, but Threadripper’s 3.5X advantage in core counts is impossible to beat, so Intel has basically ceded the top of the HEDT stack to AMD. 

You’ll get more cores, cache, and faster PCIe 4.0 connectivity with AMD’s Threadripper lineup, but they do come with higher price tags befitting such monstrous processors. However, when we boil it down to per-core pricing, or how much you pay for each CPU core, AMD does offer a compelling value story.

In the battle of high-end AMD vs Intel CPUs, AMD’s Ryzen 9 and Ryzen 7 families square off against Intel’s Core i9 and Core i7 lineup. Here Intel holds plenty of platform advantages, like support for DDR5 and PCIe 5.0, while AMD tops out at PCIe 4.0 and DDR4.

The Core i9-12900K holds the throne as the best all-around processor for gaming, single- and multi-threaded work, while the Ryzen 9 5950X takes a few scant leads in some types of multi-threaded work. However, that comes at a big tradeoff in performance in the other categories. Technically the 12900K falls into the same price bracket as the Ryzen 9 5900X, but that isn’t a fair fight — the 12900K wins hands down. You can see these three processors go head to head in our Core i9-12900K vs Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 9 5900X faceoff.

A similar story plays out in the decidedly more mainstream Ryzen 7 and Core i7 markets. Honestly, these are the chips the majority of gamers should buy if they have enough cash, though the Core i5 and Ryzen 5 models in the next category are even better for that task. Here Intel’s Core i7-12700K offers nearly the same gaming performance as the Core i9-12900K, albeit at the expense of some threaded horsepower in productivity applications, but at a far lower price point.

Without a doubt, the Core i7-12700K dominates its price point as it easily beats the price-comparable Ryzen 7 5800X and offers a far better blend of performance than the Ryzen 9 5900X. You can see those battles in more detail in the Core i7-12700K vs Ryzen 9 5900X and Ryzen 7 5800X faceoff. 

When it comes to AMD vs Intel mid-range and budget CPUs, the Core i5 and i3 families do battle with AMD’s Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 3 processors. This market segment comprises the most substantial portion of AMD and Intel’s sales, so pricing and value here are paramount. Unfortunately, due to supply issues, both AMD and Intel have largely neglected this segment of the market with their latest releases as they focus on more profitable higher-end chips. That means the Ryzen 5000 and Alder Lake families have limited options on the low end. 

AMD’s Ryzen 5 5600X was the mainstream gaming darling for over a year, but the Core i5-12600K has thoroughly unseated it with class-leading performance in all facets, including gaming, single- and multi-threaded applications. In fact, the Core i5-12600K is even a better value than the more expensive Ryzen 7 5800X that resides in a higher pricing tier. 

AMD also leans on its prior-gen Zen 2 APUs, like the Ryzen 5 4600G, to fend off Intel’s lower-end chips. If you’re looking for a sub-$200 chip for gaming, Intel wins by a vast margin. That said, AMD’s APUs come with potent Vega graphics units that enable low-end gaming across a broad spate of titles. Intel’s chips can’t hold a candle there—you’ll need a discrete GPU if you plan to do any meaningful gaming.

Neither vendor offers integrated graphics units (iGPU) with their HEDT chips. Still, even though Intel sells its graphics-less F-Series chips for a discount, it holds the advantage of having a graphics option across the full breadth of its mainstream product stack.

In contrast, AMD only offers integrated graphics on its APU models, which means you’ll need a discrete graphics card (GPU) for any retail chip that has more than four cores (or costs more than ~$150). That’s a significant disadvantage for most mainstream users who aren’t interested in gaming and eliminates a big chunk of the professional/OEM markets. Intel’s iGPUs are mostly useless for gaming but are useful for display and QuickSync purposes, while AMD’s iGPUs offer the best gaming experience, hands down. However, AMD’s limited selection cuts it out a significant portion of the market.

Winner: Intel. When you compare AMD vs Intel CPU specifications, you can see that Intel offers options with lower pricing, more performance, and a more modern platform that supports both DDR5 and PCIe 5.0. Meanwhile, AMD’s aging AM4 ecosystem has soldiered on for six long years now, hamstringing the company’s ability to move forward to faster interfaces.  

AMD vs Intel CPU Power Consumption and Heat

When comparing AMD vs Intel CPU power and heat, the former’s 7nm process node makes a huge difference. Power consumption comes as a byproduct of design choices, like lithography and architecture, which we’ll discuss below. However, higher power consumption often correlates to more heat generation, so you’ll need beefier coolers to offset the heat output of greedier chips.

As we can see, the Alder Lake chips consume far less power than the Rocket Lake chips. Overall, Intel has reduced its power consumption from meme-worthy to an acceptable level. Besides, Alder Lake is much faster than the previous-gen chips, earning it some forgiveness.

Intel had improved its 14nm processes to strengthen its power-to-performance ratio by more than 70% in the five long years it’s been on the market, but Intel’s later 14nm generations were known for high power consumption and heat than AMD’s Ryzen 5000. That’s because Intel has had to turn the power dial up further with each generation of chips to provide more performance as it fended off the resurgent AMD. 

That made Intel a notorious power guzzler, but that has changed with Alder Lake. Paired with the x86 hybrid architecture, the debut of the ‘Intel 7’ process has brought big improvements to Intel’s power consumption and efficiency metrics.

Yes, the Intel Alder Lake chips still suck more power than AMD’s Ryzen 5000 series chips, but pairing the Intel 7 process with the hybrid architecture brings big improvements, particularly in threaded work.

Still, in aggregate, AMD’s 7nm chips either consume less power or provide much better power-to-performance efficiency. As a result, you’ll get more work done per watt of energy consumed, which is a win-win, and AMD’s cooling requirements aren’t nearly as overbearing.

In fact, the Ryzen 5000 series chips are the most power-efficient desktop PC chips we’ve ever tested, with the Ryzen 5 5600X offering the best efficiency. 

Winner: AMD. In judging AMD vs Intel CPU performance per watt, It’s impossible to overstate the importance of having the densest process node paired with an efficient microarchitecture, and TSMC’s 7nm and AMD’s Zen 3 are the winning combination. The latest Ryzen processors consume less power on a performance-vs-power basis, which equates to less heat generation. That eases cooling requirements.

AMD vs Intel CPU Overclocking

There’s no debate when you compare Intel vs AMD CPU overclocking. Intel offers the most overclocking headroom, meaning you can gain more performance over the baseline speed with Intel chips than you can with AMD’s Ryzen processors. Above you can see that in chart form, and here’s that same data in table form, showing that Intel’s Alder Lake offers far more overclocking headroom than Ryzen 5000:

As mentioned, you’ll have to pay a premium for Intel’s K-Series chips and purchase a pricey Z-Series motherboard, not to mention splurge on a capable aftermarket cooler (preferably liquid), to unlock the best of Intel’s overclocking prowess. However, once you have the necessary parts, Intel’s chips are relatively easy to push to their max, which often tops out at over 5 GHz on all cores with the 11th-Gen Rocket Lake and 12th-Gen Alder Lake processors. 

Intel doesn’t allow full overclocking on B- or H-series motherboards, but it has infused memory overclocking into its B560 and H570 chipsets, and that works with any chip that is compatible with the platform, meaning all 10th-Gen Comet Lake, 11th-Gen Rocket Lake, and 11th-Gen Comet Lake Refresh processors. However, these changes only apply to 500-series models. That can provide a big boost to locked chips, like the Core i5-11400 we recently reviewed, and we expect those gains to carry over to Intel’s forthcoming lower-end Alder Lake chips.

AMD doesn’t have as much room for manual tuning. In fact, the maximum achievable all-core overclocks often fall a few hundred MHz beneath the chips’ maximum single-core boost. That means all-core overclocking can actually result in losing performance in lightly-threaded applications, albeit a minor amount.

Part of this disparity stems from AMD’s tactic of binning its chips to allow some cores to boost much higher than others. In tandem with AMD’s Precision Boost and innovative thread-targeting technique that pegs lightly-threaded workloads to the fastest cores, AMD exposes near-overlocked performance right out of the box. That results in less overclocking headroom.

However, AMD offers its Precision Boost Overdrive, a one-click auto-overclocking feature that will wring some extra performance out of your chip based on its capabilities, your motherboard’s power delivery subsystem, and your CPU cooling. AMD’s approach provides the best performance possible with your choice of components and is generally hassle-free. In either case, you still won’t achieve the high frequencies you’ll see with Intel processors (5.0 GHz is still unheard of with an AMD chip without liquid nitrogen cooling), but you do get a free performance boost.

AMD has also vastly improved its memory overclocking capabilities with the Ryzen 5000 series, which comes as a byproduct of the improved fabric overclocking capabilities. That allows AMD memory to clock higher than before while still retaining the low-latency attributes that boost gaming performance. 

Winner: Intel. When it comes to AMD vs Intel CPU overclocking, Team Blue has far more headroom and much higher attainable frequencies. Just be prepared to pay for the privilege – you’ll have to buy a K-series processor. Intel has added memory overclocking to the newest B- and H-series motherboards, which is an improvement.

AMD’s approach is friendlier to entry-level users, rewarding them with hassle-free overclocking based on their system’s capabilities, but you don’t gain as much performance. 

AMD vs Intel CPU Lithography

There are a few major underlying technologies that dictate the potency of any chip. The most fundamental rule of processors still holds true: The densest process nodes, provided they have decent power, performance, and area (PPA) characteristics, will often win the battle if paired with a solid microarchitecture. When you judge AMD vs Intel CPUs based on these criteria, AMD has the lead in lithography.

But whether or not AMD actually owns the process lead is a topic of debate: Unlike Intel, AMD doesn’t produce its processors. Instead, the company designs its processors and then contracts with outside fabs that actually produce the chips. In the case of AMD’s current-gen Ryzen processors, the company uses a combination of GlobalFoundries 12nm process and TSMC’s 7nm node for its chips, with the latter being the most important.

TSMC’s 7nm node is used by the likes of Apple and Huawei, among many others, so it benefits from industry-wide funding and collaborative engineering. In contrast, Intel itself says its process tech won’t retake the leadership crown until it releases its ‘Intel 20A’ node (2024 time frame). 

The benefits of TSMC’s 7nm node mean AMD can build cheaper, faster, and denser chips with more performance cores, and all within a relatively low power consumption envelope.

Intel has seen a bit of a resurgence with its new Alder Lake lineup. Intel etches those cores on its ‘Intel 7’ process, finally ending the misery of the 14nm node after six long years that ultimately cost the company its performance lead over AMD in desktop PCs. We previously knew this ‘Intel 7’ manufacturing tech as 10nm Enhanced SuperFin, but Intel recently renamed its process nodes to match industry nomenclature. Technically, this is the second generation of Intel’s 10nm process, but it’s a first for desktop PCs.

The new ‘Intel 7’ node brings the company into much closer competition with AMD on the process node front. Yes, Alder Lake still sucks more power than AMD’s Ryzen 5000 series chips, but the arrival of the Intel 7 process does mark a big improvement. Overall, Intel has reduced its power consumption from meme-worthy to an acceptable level. Alder Lake is also much faster than its predecessor, which lends itself to vastly improved power efficiency metrics. 

AMD’s only concern is production capacity: While AMD has access to 7nm production, the company can’t source enough silicon from TSMC, at least in the near term, to match the power of Intel’s captive fabs. That leaves AMD exposed to shortages and potentially restricts market penetration, particularly during chip shortages. Meanwhile, Intel doesn’t suffer from such extreme production shortages. 

Winner: AMD (TSMC). The ‘Intel 7’ process does bring Team Blue back into closer competition with AMD than it has been over the last several years, but AMD still holds the overall power efficiency and transistor density crown due to the virtues of TSMC’s 7nm process.

Intel vs AMD CPU Architecture

When comparing AMD vs Intel CPUs, we must consider that two design decisions have a big impact on performance, scalability, and performance-per-dollar: Interconnects and microarchitecture.

AMD’s Infinity Fabric allows the company to tie together multiple dies into one cohesive processor. Think of this as numerous pieces of a puzzle that come together to form one larger picture. The approach allows the company to use many small dies instead of one large die, and this technique improves yields and reduces cost. It also grants a level of scalability that Intel might not be able to match with its new mesh interconnect inside its HEDT chips, and it undoubtedly takes the lead over Intel’s aging ring bus in its desktop processors.

AMD first paired that advantage with its Zen microarchitecture, designed from the ground up for scalability, yielding an explosive 52% increase in instructions per clock (IPC) throughput over AMD’s previous-gen ‘Bulldozer’ chips. The Zen 2 microarchitecture another 15% improvement to IPC. Paired with the 7nm process, AMD lunged forward another (up to) 31% in per-core performance (a mixture of frequency and IPC). Zen 3 brings another 19% jump in IPC, giving AMD its largest single step forward in the post-Bulldozer era. 

The move to the Zen 2 architecture brought AMD’s processors to near-parity with Intel’s finest in terms of per-core performance. That’s largely because Intel is stuck on 14nm, and its architectures are designed specifically for the nodes they are built on. That means promising new Intel microarchitectures can only ride on smaller processes, like 10nm, leaving the company woefully unprepared for its prolonged issues productizing 10nm products.

Zen 3 gave AMD a sizable lead in per-core performance, an incredibly important metric that quantifies the speed of the most important building block in a chip design. Intel’s Rocket Lake chips take huge steps forward in per-core performance, leaving both companies on a relatively even playing field in terms of per-core performance.

Intel’s 12th-Gen Alder Lake chips bring the company’s hybrid x86 architecture, which combines a mix of larger high-performance cores paired with smaller high-efficiency cores, to desktop x86 PCs for the first time. The Golden Cove architecture powers Alder Lake’s ‘big’ high-performance cores, while the ‘little’ Atom efficiency cores come with the Gracemont architecture. Intel etches the cores on its ‘Intel 7‘ process, marking the company’s first truly new node for the desktop since 14nm debuted six long years ago. 

Intel’s new Thread Director is the sleeper tech that enables the huge performance gains we’ve seen with Alder Lake. However, due to Alder’s use of both faster and slower cores that are optimized for different voltage/frequency profiles, unlocking the maximum performance and efficiency requires the operating system and applications to have an awareness of the chip topology to ensure workloads (threads) land in the correct core based on the type of application. 

Overall, the Alder Lake architecture has proven to be a big win for Intel, with class-leading performance in gaming, not to mention in both single- and multi-threaded workloads in standard applications. However, while the hybrid x86 architecture hails from a similar ethos as the big.LITTLE designs pioneered by Arm, it doesn’t have the same tuning for power efficiency. Instead, Intel unabashedly tunes its design for performance at any cost, so AMD still holds the power efficiency crown in most types of workloads. 

Winner: Tie. In judging AMD vs Intel CPU architecture, it’s clear that the competition is now far closer than it has been over the last few years. AMD’s Zen 3 architecture is a marvel that allows for enhanced scalability, and due to the efficiency-minded design paired with the TSMC 7 node, it delivers superior power consumption metrics. On the other hand, Intel’s Alder Lake architecture is also a marvel in its own right, bringing the first pairing of small efficient cores with large performance cores to x86 desktop PCs for the first time. That lends it the performance advantage, but it still trails in power efficiency metrics, resulting in a tie in this category. 

AMD vs Intel CPU Drivers and Software

When we look at AMD vs Intel CPU software support, Team Blue has a stronger reputation. AMD has suffered plenty of issues with its CPU and chipset drivers, a natural byproduct of its limited resources compared to its much-larger rivals. Intel isn’t without its missteps on the driver front, but its reputation for stability helped earn it the top spot in the processor market, particularly with OEMs.

In terms of its established products, Intel’s graphics drivers have become much better lately as the company ramps up to bring its dedicated Xe Graphics cards to market. Day-zero game drivers have become the norm for the chip producer.

You might be a little more cautious when approaching Intel’s more exotic solutions, though. In the past, the company has developed innovative new products that have been relegated to the dustbin of history due to pricing and market forces, and long-term support for those products might not always be clear-cut.

AMD still has its work cut out for it. The company has had several issues with BIOS releases that failed to expose its chips’ full performance, though AMD has mostly solved those issues after a long string of updates. As a side effect of being the smaller challenger, AMD also faces a daunting challenge in offsetting the industry’s incessant optimization for Intel’s architectures above all others.

Upsetting the semiconductor industry is hard, particularly when you’re fighting an entrenched and much-larger rival, and sometimes things get broken when you’re redefining an industry. In AMD’s case, those broken things consist of operating systems and applications that weren’t tuned to extract the full performance of its fledgling first-gen Zen architecture, let alone the core-heavy designs of Zen 3. 

Intel also continues to face challenges, though. The company’s Alder Lake architecture is the first hybrid x86 design and uses large performance cores (P-cores) and small efficiency cores (E-cores) for different types of tasks. Placing the correct workloads on the correct cores requires a new Intel Thread Director technology, but that’s only supported in Windows 11. That means some programs might need extra handholding to extract the best performance in Windows 10. 

Winner: Intel wins the battle of AMD vs Intel CPU drivers and software. Over the last year, Intel has addressed its laggardly driver updates for its integrated graphics, and the company has an army of software developers at its disposal that help ensure its products get relatively timely support with the latest software. AMD has made amazing progress convincing the developer ecosystem to optimize for its new Zen architectures. However, there’s still plenty of work to be done as the company moves forward.

AMD vs Intel CPU Security

The last few years have found security researchers poking and prodding at the speculative execution engine that’s one of the key performance-boosting features behind all modern chips. The resulting research has spawned an almost never-ending onslaught of new vulnerabilities that threaten the safety of your system and private data. Unfortunately, these types of vulnerabilities are incredibly dangerous because they are undetectable—these tactics steal data by using the processor exactly as it was designed; thus, they are undetectable by any known anti-virus program.

The rash of fixes required to plug these holes also continues to grow, and many of them result in reduced performance. That’s particularly painful for Intel because it suffers from more of these vulnerabilities than other vendors. The company has developed in-silicon mitigations with newer processors that can reduce or eliminate the performance overhead, but some older processors are subject to drastic reductions in performance. 

Intel has now suffered a new round of Spectre v2-variant attacks, too, that has reduced its performance further. These new Spectre Branch History Injection (BHI) vulnerabilities can result in substantial performance losses that vary by workload. 

AMD isn’t immune to vulnerabilities, though. It’s hard to ascertain if the initially limited discoveries in AMD processors were due to a security-first approach to hardened processor design, or if researchers and attackers merely focused on Intel’s processors due to their commanding market share: Attackers almost always focus on the broadest cross-section possible. We see a similar trend with malware being designed for Windows systems, by far the predominant desktop OS, much more frequently than MacOS, though that does appear to be changing.

In the course of the research into the new class of Spectre vulnerabilities, Intel actually discovered that AMD’s existing Spectre mitigation is broken, which has resulted in AMD using a different, slower approach to addressing the issue.

However, AMD has also had several other new vulnerability disclosures in the recent past, including a Meltdown-esque variant that requires software re-coding. Like Intel, AMD has made a few targeted in-silicon fixes for its Ryzen 5000 processors, thus lowering its exposure to the vulnerabilities.

Winner: AMD. The AMD vs Intel CPU security debate continues to evolve as researchers and nefarious actors alike turn more of an eye towards AMD’s newer architectures. As things stand, Intel still suffers from more known vulnerabilities than AMD, and the impact of the Spectre mitigations on previous-gen Intel processors leads to larger performance losses (at times equivalent to a few generational gains worth of improvement) than the fixes we’ve seen from AMD, granting Team Red the win.