It is the eternal debate that will never end as such and that generation after generation will attract controversy as few environments do beyond the king of sport or politics. Intel vs AMD in this case, since in the saga of articles that we will launch soon we will see the opposite case and we will expose their arguments, where we will now see the reasons why Intel continues in front of its great rival and where they are overcome. Why are Intel CPUs better? ready? here we go!
In what ways are Intel CPUs ahead of AMDs, where do they outperform them?
It will not be easy to find strong and well-founded reasons to argue an article like this, and we are sure there will be discrepancies, but the experience is a degree and the possibility of playing material every day gives a much broader and more global concept of the advantages that some CPUs and others provide.
So armed to the teeth and with war paints as we have done with AMD in another article that we will publish later, we are going to know the main reasons that put Intel ahead of AMD, as well as its advantages.
Best platform
If something has Intel far above AMD it is a series of platforms that are at a much higher level than those of its rival. Obviously we are not talking about performance, but other details such as support, stability, updates and, ultimately, fewer errors, which is the first thing to look for when buying a PC, whatever it is.
Intel is clear that if it has to segment architectures into multiple sockets it will do so, something that is highly criticized, but that positions it much better than AMD in stability, compatibility and smaller-caliber improvements .
New socket implies drastic improvements in key aspects such as future support, better SKUs, better voltage control for architecture, improvements such as DMI or new USB / Thunderbolt, correction of errors in both hardware and software and, in short, very plug & play platforms that work smoothly from minute one.
Higher frequencies
Focusing on the CPU section, it is very evident that Intel is still the king of frequency today, and although it is not everything, it does make a difference in certain environments. The games are the most representative of them, where a large number of engines thrive on a higher speed to gain FPS due to the multiparallelism of their actions.
That’s easy to say because Intel has been dragging its Skylake core architecture for years with minimal improvements to its CPUs, where the core has been higher frequency and cores, but performance has taken off from four years ago so far. This shows the advantage it has over AMD, where despite having a lower CPI at present, it is still ahead (for now) in gaming.
Obviously, a greater frequency has direct consequences in other internal sections such as the cache or the registries and its domain extends to various software, where the company is also ahead of its rival, such as the Adobe package or various professional software from video and audio.
Better BMI
As we well know, RAM is currently the widest bottleneck that a PC or server has to work with data (we discard SSDs by their nature). Having a very advanced memory controller is a very favorable point for any CPU and in this case it is necessary to have a global vision of what Intel proposes: the same number of channels as its rival, but greater frequency support.
Although AMD has made a leap forward with Zen 2, its speed and support are still less than Intel. In the gaming section to be specific, this can give certain games an advantage as laughable as it is decisive, it all depends on the engine in question.
In any case, having more performance in the main bottleneck of a PC is always synonymous with higher performance in general and here Intel is still better than AMD even at lower voltage.
Best overclocking system
By overclock system we mean more options within a section as specific as this one. Intel has a very clear advantage here, and perhaps two broadly. First of all, it has the ability to work with adaptive voltages , something that AMD does not even dream of at the moment and that apparently does not have Zen 3 as such.
This, as we have already seen, has a very interesting advantage and is simply not adding or subtracting the user-specified voltage to all SKUs that the processor carries. Therefore, the voltage change would only apply to the Turbo frequency, leaving the rest of the stock.
As if this were not enough, the voltage of the processor and the cache is unified in the latest architectures, so that squeezing the CPU is much easier than before.
Best chipsets
Although AMD supports PCIe 4.0, Intel internally does so in its CPUs, although it will not enable it in Comet Lake-S but in Rocket Lake-S due to the delays precisely of its chipsets. The latter are still in PCIe 3.0 and although this reduces the strength of the main argument of this section, it is not so much.
Intel continues to have much more advanced chipsets , with wider interconnection buses, more internal PCIe lines destined for a greater number of connections, faster and also all with lower consumption and temperatures. This is important when you need more connections on your PC, be they USB, HDMI or any other interface, not to mention Thunderbolt which, although released, few AMD boards add it as standard.
Intel CPUs still have the best lithographic processes
It is another controversial section, perhaps the most, but on the balance and keeping in mind the last of the three main foundries in the world, Intel currently has the best lithographic process in the world, its 10 nm.
It is true that they are not giving the fruits that the company wants, since the frequencies of the first batch are not high, as it already happened at 14 nm in its output, but like TSMC, its 10 nm + will bring a rise more than Interesting MHz at the same density, so it maintains the advantage over the Taiwanese N7P and none of its weaknesses.
Keep in mind that we are comparing current lithographic processes, without EUV and that are in production or on ramp for it, that is, something tangible today and that has been confirmed by the companies for 2020. Therefore, Intel It continues to maintain the leadership also in this section and therefore its new CPUs like the Tiger Lake will benefit from this node.
In innovation, Intel CPUs continue to lead
If lithographic processes are controversial per se, the innovation section will be no less. You can think that AMD with its MCM-based Ryzen are ahead technologically speaking, but this does not mean that the monocore engineering work of Intel should be underestimated, and we explain ourselves.
If AMD opted for MCM it is precisely because it saw no future to maintain a single die, neither in frequencies, nor in scalability and of course in R&D costs. No company in the world has been able to bring a stock CPU under 14nm or a similar node in density to a frequency as high as 5.3 GHz , with a BMI capable of supporting frequencies around 4 GHz or higher in a stable way, with 10 cores and a consumption so tight below 250 watts in full.
Even AMD with CCX and a more advanced node does not achieve something similar, therefore, it is necessary to grant them merit knowing the time and the improvements that the node has behind them and taking into account that those of Lisa Su abandoned because they would not be able to reach these quotas, as the current CEO of the company said at the time.
Although the movement of Lisa Su with Ryzen caught Intel “resting on his laurels”, specifically since Haswell, the company dimension that is Intel today was fast enough to start the development of technologies that we will see in the next two years and that will revolutionize the world of CPUs as we know it.
Innovation is not just what is on the table and we can buy, it is the future that each company raises and here Intel released “the greens” long ago. Foveros, EMIB, CXL, PCIe 5.0, Thunderbolt 4, FPGA, IA… They have not been idle.
AMD’s response will once again be based on buses or systems proposed by Intel in various consortia that the blues have carried out and although logically they will compete on equal terms for obvious reasons in these cases, “to Caesar what is Caesar’s” . It is not a surprise, David is competing against Goliath and we already know who is who and the merit that each one has in this fight, but in this specific section you have to take off your hat with the blues and applaud.
And so far the list of general arguments for Intel against AMD, there will surely be debate in certain aspects, but in our opinion and experience, these are the reasons where the blues are ahead of the reds.
