Tech News - May 2006

Intel Vs. AMD Who's better?

By Jeremy Robertson

The battle for the best processor has been going on for decades and In the early years the Intel Pentium processors with their newly found processing power were the chip to have. In the early 90's, If your pc said Intel Inside you had a top of the line pc. Nothing would beat it. The Jump from the 486 pc to the Pentium, was a great accomplishment for Intel. It paved the way for future Pentium processors. However, in the last 20 years Intel's game plan has not changed much. They simply want there processors to go up in the clock speeds (mhz or ghz). The Pentium processor started as a 75 mhz processor and it was pretty fast compared to a 486. Then the guys at Intel created 100 mhz processor, then a 200, 233, 300, 500, and so on. One of the downfalls is about this time AMD introduced a new processor ( the AMD K6-2)  that could rival the Intel giants for less money. However in most benchmarks the K6-2 would still be beat by an equal Pentium processor, but since the price for an AMD was cheaper AMD began to gain some ground. Intel then turned out a brand new processor using a slot instead of the normal socket. At the time this was a pretty big advancement in technology as it made for a faster bus. witch means the Intel PII processor was the new bad boy, even though the PII had less Mhz (clock speed) then the late Pentiums.

Intel was on top for the time. With the release of the PIII processor, AMD decided to step up to the plate once again bringing us the AMD Athlon processor. With the new Thunderbird line, AMD was the first to bring us a 1 ghz processor. This processor was fast, reliable, overclockable, and compared to Intel's PIII was cheap. Then Intel got the bright idea to turn off the L2 cache on the processor and release it underclocked, This made people want to buy them as they were perfectly stable when overclocked (mainly because the processor was sold as a slower processor than it truely was.) and sell the processor for less than the Athlon. AMD answered with the AMD Duron processor.  Intel soon released the P4 processor, This processor was the Best processor that Intel had released and for a time it would meet or beat the new Athlons. But because the Athlons were much cheaper than a P4, and could be overclocked to up to 2.0 ghz they were still the best deal.

Now with all the new AMD processors on the market today and the super fast clock speeds of the P4, You ask me who is better? Well it depends on what you want. The AMD Sempron processors are fast, reliable and cheap. The AMD 64 bit processors can at this time not be beat. They have proven to be  faster and use less power then the P4 so it's graet for laptops. But the P4 with it's hyperthreading technologies, has the fastest clock speeds on the market today.

My professional opinion is that speed is not just found in the clock speed but in the bus speeds and 64 bit architectures of the AMD processors they have managed to whip the Intel chips at every turn even though Intel has the fastest clock speeds. When the processors are benchmarked side by side the AMD comes out on top on most all aspects of the test. So in conclusion I have laid my faith in the cost effective, performance and reliability of the AMD Processor.

So I hope this article helps!!

Jeremy M. Robertson
Senior Technician
The Computer Generation Inc.