AMD vs INTEL - THE BATTLE FOR BEST CPU BRAND

By ioplus3 

When I was a Tech Novice, my first PC which seller assembled had Intel Pentium Dual Core CPU, but when I gained some knowledge, I straight away jumped on AMD bandwagon and got an AMD Phenom II X6 processor for my second processor. But, the third time I got Intel i7-7700K and now for my fourth build I am going to get AMD Ryzen 3700X. So, you can see I am jumping trains here. Since my second PC, my choices reflect the market trend and what’s happened with Intel and AMD.

To Explain which brand is better we need to go over a history lesson about both companies and technology they introduced.

In 1971, Intel was the among the small companies which were competing in the market to get a foothold in the CPU market. They introduced there first CPU Intel 4004 (4-bit, 7.4KHz). But it was Intel 8086, a 16-bit, clocked at 10MHz & capable of addressing 1MB of RAM, launched in 1978, which laid the groundwork for next 50 years. It gave rise to x86 Architecture which eventually became Intel's most successful line of processors & is still used in most of our devices. 

 Meanwhile, In 1975 AMD launched its first processor Am9080, a reverse-engineered clone of Intel 8080 (8-bit, 2MHz) which was launched in 1974, without a license from Intel. Later in 1981, IBM created it’s PC and wanted Intel’s x86 CPUs but only under one condition that Intel gets a second-source because if something goes wrong with Intel itself they have another source to fall back on. Thus, Intel and AMD came under a 10-year technology exchange agreement.

Throughout 1980s AMD remained Intel’s second source and manufacture Intel CPUs. AMD launched Am286 in 1984 copy of Intel’s 80286 for IBM Clones which was a rapidly growing market.

In 1985, Intel 386 DX was launched which was the first 32-bit x86 processor capable of addressing up to 4GB of RAM a limitation which was not lifted for next 20 years. But Intel stopped giving AMD exact second source designs. While AMD has x86 license to work with, but they don’t have the CPU designs to develop the new CPU.

Thus, AMD developed Am386 a clone of Intel 80386, but in 1987 Intel dragged AMD to court saying that contract covered CPU designs for 80286 and prior CPU designs while AMD interpretation of the contract was that it covered all the derivatives of x86 family for 10 years. AMD finally won the case and launched Am386 in 1991. It sold millions of units, positioning AMD as a legitimate competitor to Intel, rather than being merely a second source for x86 CPUs. While Intel 80386 was clocked at 33MHz, AMD Am386 ran at 40MHz priced at lower cost. The legal battle between intel and AMD lasted till 1995, but had intel win the prices of CPUs would have been significantly higher. It’s the competition that brewed between both the companies ultimately benefitted the consumer.

In 1993, AMD also cloned Intel 80486 and sold it as Am486 at a lower cost which also took a big chunk out of Intel’s profit.

Beginning in 1986, AMD adapted RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) with their own AMD Am29000 (29k) processor, instead of CISC (Complex Instruction Set Computer) which Intel used and survived as an embedded processor.

With the end of 10-year tech exchange contract high reverse engineering costs, AMD decided to develop its own chips.

In 1993, Intel launched its first Pentium, dubbed as P5. AMD answer to that was K5 launched in 1996. AMD’s first x86 processor entirely developed by AMD based on RISC. It had a great design which bypassed Pentium and took fight head-on with Pentium Pro.

In 1997 Intel launched Pentium II (P6) & AMD launched K6 in the same year and K6-2 in 1998. In 1999 Intel launched Pentium III and AMD launched K6-3 to compete with it. The great thing about K6 series was that it was designed to fit into existing sockets of Pentium branded CPUs. Due to competitive pricing AMD got up to 70% of share in PCs below Rs 70000 at one point in 1998. Pentium III introduced SpeedStep, ability to run at a lower clock speed & power state when idle. AMD released there K7 “Athlon” processor.

Now remember that simple “Pentium” or “Athlon”, or from present, Intel’s “Core i3 , i5, i7 & i9” & AMD’s “Ryzen 3, 5 & 7” represents a series of microprocessors with different individual variants in which core count’s or speed or generation or some technical aspect can be different. Like Intel Core i5-8500 gets up to 4.0 GHz and belongs to 8^th Generation while Core i5-9600K is unlocked for overclocking and runs at 4.6 GHz and belongs to 9^th Generation. Similarly, AMD Ryzen 2600X runs at 4.2 GHz and belongs to 2^nd generation while AMD Ryzen 5 3600X runs at 4.4 GHz and belongs to 3^rd Generation.

On 6th March 2000, AMD announced that they were shipping their new Athlon K75 processor with 1 GHz speed and beating Intel by just two days. Intel announced their Pentium III 1 GHz on 8^th March 2000. While Intel was late to deliver the Pentium III 1 GHz, AMD had Athlon K75 ready in stocks.

Intel launched Pentium 4 in late 2000 with incremental performance then Pentium 3 while AMD lower clocked Athlon could perform better in certain applications.

In 2001, AMD announced a new branding scheme. Instead of identifying processors by their clock speed, the AMD Athlon XP processors will bear names like 1500+, 1600+, 1700+, 1800+, 1900+, 2000+, etc. Each higher model number will represent a higher clock speed. With clever marketing, riding on the name of Windows XP AMD sold more units than they could with their previous branding scheme. AMD also launched Athlon MP, for Multi-Processor, which can be used on Dual socket platform for power users.

In late 2002, Intel added Hyper-Threading Technology to Pentium 4, which improves the ability of CPU doing multiple tasks at once. After that Intel keep adding incremental performance increases to their Pentium 4 series CPUs for next 4 years as they keep casing the higher clock speeds with their Extreme edition chips priced ludicrously. 

Meanwhile, AMD launched Athlon 64, it’s first K8 generation with AMD64, 64-bit architecture in Sep 2003 beating Intel again in 64-bit computing. Intel had to get a license from AMD, to use their AMD64 bit architecture in their future Pentium 4 releases, rather set the standard themselves.

In 2005, Intel launched Pentium D, Intel’s first Dual-core offering for Desktop on April 16 while AMD then launched first dual-core desktop CPU, Athlon 64 X2 (K9) on April 21, a week later. Both the companies already had multiple core CPUs for Servers.

In 2006, Intel made a return to the performance dominance on the desktop end with Core 2 lineup of Dual & Quad Core processors which officially ended the GHz war as with the greater emphasis on efficiency a lower clocked Core 2 Chip can easily smoke a much more power-hungry, higher clocked Pentium 4 Chip. There were many improvements to the design and features. Intel introduced Virtualization, the ability to run multiple operating systems with no performance hit on a single CPU chip.

AMD offered their first “true” Quad-Core CPUs with Phenom (K10) in 2007, as all these CPUs were on same Silicon die, while Intel’s Core 2 Quad was Multiple CPU chips brought together on another larger Chip.

Due to poor management choices took back in 1994 to get more Fabrication units & in 2007 to Buy ATI, a dedicated graphics card company took a toll on AMD. They got into huge debt and eventually have to sell out their fabrication units. Currently, AMD owns no Fabrication units.

With Core i3, Core i5 & i7 released in late 2008, Turbo Boost was added which momentary increases clock speed when workload increases when power & thermal allows.

Phenom II X6 was first 6 core CPU launched in 2010 by AMD and that was last of the good days for AMD.

Integrated Graphics was also added by Intel to its CPU package in 2010.  While AMD released their CPU with integrated graphics as Accelerated Processing Unit, APU, in 2011, but it was better than Intel’s counterpart because of reduced latency between CPU & GPU & other devices.

AMD launched FX Bulldozer processors in late 2011 & Piledriver in late 2012 and focused on more CPU counts and higher clock speeds, which were useless as most of the applications & games performance depends on Single-core performance. There Single & Multi-core performance dropped over the years as Intel kept improving their processors. There was no practical benefit of paying AMD as Intel processors with similar price range performed better.

As AMD started to lose it’s holding over the Market and became uncompetitive for the better part of last decade, Intel decided that the average user has got all the performance that they need and gave only consistent 10 to 15 % of performance increase with each generation. We got updated new I/O system with M.2 and Thunderbolt. But not much had happened since 2010, until a couple of years back.

AMD made a comeback with its Ryzen Series based on Zen micro-architecture in early 2017. It was a complete re-design that marked the return of AMD to the High-end CPU market, offering a product to compete Intel 7^th Gen CPUs at every level. Ryzen 3 for Core i3, Ryzen 5 for Core i5 & Ryzen 7 for Core i7. It delivered 52% improvement over Bulldozer AMD core, without increasing the power consumption. Intel was still the leader in single-core performance but having more processing cores Ryzen offers greater multi-threaded performance at the same price. In August 2017, AMD launched Threadripper with 16 cores and 32 threads and kicked intel where it hurt most. AMD targeted the High-End Desktops and Workstation market with Threadripper, which was always dominated by Intel. Intel was caught off guard and AMD gave Intel a run for their money.

Threadripper was built by AMD engineers in their spare time for about a year before it they sought a green light from management. And many years later came Threadripper.  Intel already launched Core i9, an 18 core CPU with 36 threads, in June 2017 but it failed to impress the enthusiast as it was priced around Rs 70K to Rs 1.4 Lakh. Whereas Threadripper prices started from Rs 42K to 70K. While Intel was still a leader in performance but the Price-performance ratio that Threadripper gave made it the first choice for PC builders.

We observed similar performance & price from Intel Core iX 8^th Gen and AMD Ryzen 2^nd Gen based on Zen + architecture, where intel kept its lead in performance but lost to AMD when it comes to pricing. AMD CPU Market share grew from 11% in the third quarter of 2017 to 20.2% in the first quarter of 2018 and to 30.2% in the first quarter of 2019.

As Intel owns it’s own fabrication units and AMD don’t, AMD has gained one advantage over Intel. While the latest 9^th Generation CPUs from Intel are still based on 14nm which they are using since late 2014,  AMD doesn’t own fabrication unit and can get it’s CPUs fabricated from different companies around the world with the latest technology. And thus Ryzen 1^st Gen was fabricated with 14 nm, 2^nd Gen with 12 nm and recently launched it’s 3^rd Gen Ryzen with industries first 7 nm on 7-7-19.

The Ryzen 3^rd Generation CPUs have finally beat up Intel with Faster and more cores. AMD Ryzen 9 3900X has 12 Core 24 threads clocked ar 3.8 GHz & 4.6 GHz boost priced at Rs 48500 while Intel max offering Core i9-9900K offers 8 Core 16 threads clocked at 3.6 GHz & 5.0 GHz boost at Rs 39000. Intel has also cut the price of 9900K from their launch price of Rs 66,500 after getting so much competition from AMD. 

In conclusion, the Best CPU comes out of the competition between AMD and Intel. It’s not in favor of consumer should any of the two companies drop out of the business. AMD keeps Intel prices in check and forces him to pump out new things. It’s not like Intel didn’t have the minds and technology to build new things but due to the absence of AMD from CPU mainstream market, they stopped thinking about the next best thing. Out of this competition, great technologies have emerged and would keep coming.  Now as RED team has upped their game, something good must come out of the BLUE team. For now, the ball is in Intel’s court.