Intel vs. AMD, Which Is Better? (Part I)

Intel vs. AMD, Which Is Better?

You may have seen report saying that Intel is better, and on the next day, another report saying AMD is better.

You are confused…which one is better? AMD or Intel?

Both AMD and Intel CPUs are built on different circuitry and for that, it is impossible to compare apple to apple. If you were to ask me which one is better, I can only say that both are equally good and whether you choose an Intel or AMD CPU depend entirely on your preferences.

Below we will discuss the unique features of each CPU brand.

Intel: HyperThreading

Hyper threading is an Intel technology that enables the operating system to treat a single CPU as two separate CPU. In this case, the OS can split its workload into multiple threads and sent them to the two CPU concurrently. With the same amount of time spent, twice the amount of work can be done.

However, things don’t always happen as good as it sounds; HyperThreading does not necessarily lead to a performance increase. Let see why:

If you are running two pieces of software, each under its own thread, then HyperThreading can be effectively utilized to process the data simultaneously. In this case, you will see a noticeable boost in your system performance. However, in the event that there is only an application with a large chunk of data that cannot be easily split into smaller parts, the OS can only load one CPU with the calculation and leave the other idle. While this won’t cause your system to slow down, it is really a waste of resource. Such incidents are particularly true for games where all the logics are dependent to each other, and it is just not possible to split the tasks and processed with different CPU.

For HyperThreading to really increase the system performance, the software using it has to be specifically programmed for this optimization.