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

AMD: HyperTransport

Hyper transport is an AMD technology designed to increase the communication speed between various components in computers. It is a completely different technology from Intel HyperThreading, but can achieve the same effect of raising the system performance. While HyperThreading serves to increase the amount of work done per CPU, HyperTransport serves to improve the data transfer process from other hardware to the CPU. What it does is to reduce the number of connection (buses) in a system, such that data can be transported from a component to another component in a shorter amount of time. This reduces the system bottlenecks and enables the CPU to use system memory more efficiently.

Core Frequency

As mentioned earlier, both Intel and AMD CPU have different circuitry and you can’t compare them apple to apple. This applies the same for their clock speed as well. If you have noticed, Intel’s speed always seems to be higher than AMD. Be careful, this does not imply that the Intel CPU is better.

The higher clocker speed simply means that there are more work cycles per second, not the amount of work done per second. Intel CPU has the tendency to divide its task into many small parts for easy processing. As such, the amount of work done per cycle is relatively small. On the contrast, AMD has lesser work cycle, but it processes more data per cycle. Thus, when it adds up, the amount of work done can be quite significant.

Unless we do benchmarking to determine the performance of each AMD and Intel CPU, it is definitely not a good idea to say that Intel is a better chip because it has a higher clock speed.