IT Professionals

Intel vs AMD In The Dual-Core Era

Posted by on Jan 22, 2010 | 4 Comments

First and foremost, I was an AMD man for years. Dating back to the K6 CPU days, I was rocking AMD CPUs all the way until my last one which was the Athlon 64 3200+ series. I even had AMD on my notebooks as well, despite its mobile processors being awful with power management.

Today, I am exclusively using Intel. Intel graphics and wireless in my notebook, Intel CPU dual-core processors in my desktops. I honestly can say that, after using Intel for all of this time, I have not been able to find a single reason to give AMD my business once again.

Understand that this is not me getting caught up in the marketing nonsense. No, I have looked into doing an AMD system again. Yet being as I rarely build my own systems anymore, my choices are really limited if I want to find something worth owning. Worse, AMD is still not worth owning on the mobile front, what with the Intel Atom rocking the netbook market. No, I honestly think that as this weekend comes up, I am done thinking about AMD. It’s destined to simply become a part of my history.

[awsbullet:Dungeons and Desktops]

  • Ron

    I build and repair PCs. I give the customer what they want, and most want AMD. They are simply less expensive, and that price point is meaningful. Entry level dual core processors from intel start at about $140 vs the AMD processors at $73. Performance is roughly equal. Intel motherboards start around $82 vice AMD boards at $67. so, it’s easy to save almost $100 by buying AMD.
    So if the writer prefers Intel, fine. my customers don’t.

  • http://www.woote.com, bw

    Hopefully AMD can remain viable and inventive and keep Intel on it’s toes. Nothing saps innovation like total market domination.

  • Jason

    I have to totally agree with Matt. Over the years I’ve found Intel processors and Intel brand motherboards to be more reliable. To me it’s worth the slight premium for their products. I’ve had less failures and heat issues with Intel by far. In my opinion AMD’s biggest issue is the fact that they don’t produce their own branded motherboard. The combination of Intel processors and MBs has made for fewer issues. When an issue does arise, I’m not sitting there with two different manufactures blaming one another. Also, I got bit pretty hard during the Taiwanese, blown/leaking capacitor problem with 3rd party boards in my AMD days. That wasn’t AMD’s fault, but if they were producing their own motherboards, they would have had the chance like Intel, not to have the problem capacitors and affect so many of its customers.

  • http://twitter.com/paytyler Paytyler

    I’ve done some research on cpu benchmarks and it is often to see an Intel dual core processor outperform an AMD quad core.

    One thing about AMD though is their pricing. Because of this, when I built a desktop for my parents, I got them a board with an AMD Athlon. I think I’m done with AMD and this is the only one I’ve tried. When it comes to scaling. AMD doesn’t even compare with my Core 2 Duos. My parent’s AMD has also given me a lot of problems with overheating.