Intel 13th gen is cheaper to buy and faster than AMD 7000. Power consumption is higher though, and according to my math with the energy prices in my area, the cost difference would be made up by AMD in about 3 or 4 years given several hours a day of heavy CPU usage.
So if the Intel chip is more expensive and slower, why is everyone buying them? (Not a fanboy and not currently up to speed with where the market is at, just trying to follow the logic.)
- Engineering support when you're designing a new motherboard
- CPU SKUs with different use conditions. Intel Industrial rated CPUs are rated for 24/7 operation, 100% duty cycle for 10 years. I'm not aware if AMD has an equivalent.
- Long product support - CPU SKUs that are "guaranteed" to be around for X number of years. As as example, some Icelake SKUs are planned to be supported for 10-15 years. Let's use an x-ray scanner as an example. The x-ray scanner mfg needs a computer inside the machine to help process info and display images. The x-ray equipment has an intended lifespan of at least 5 years and they plan to sell/service this equipment for at least 10 years. The mfg wants to use an embedded computer that's going to be commercially available for a long time so they don't have to re-engineer and re-certify their machine. This is one reason why you see some "stickiness" with Intel.
IIRC, The FDA (or the EU, or both) requires something like 10 years of support for medical equipment such as x-ray machines. If you want to sell the product for 5 years, then you need 15 years of parts availability.
Because your average person isn't an enthusiast who builds their computer themselves, who knows better, and will necessarily change their buying decisions and habits. Instead most buyers choose whatever is good enough and convenient, or whatever brand they've typically historically trusted, or whatever their peers end up getting, or whatever an advertisement/reviewer/salesmen tells them because they're ignorant and not tech savvy.
Then you have reasons associated with vendor lock in. I mean, most people buy DEVICES, not CPUs, and device manufactures are hesitant to switch, because doing so can potentially be complicated and prohibitively costly (especially if they already have deals with their current vendors). Whereas their customers will end up buying their devices regardless of whether they switch CPU vendors or not (because of reasons mentioned above)...
Ergo, as other's have already sort of alluded, it's largely because of branding, marketing, and vendor lock in.
Intel makes billions of dollars more per year than AMD, and has throughout its whole history.
Intel isn't strapped for cash to do R&D, and if they are, AMD is way worse off. Go look at profit numbers for both companies over the last 5 years. It's not even close.
To pretend like intel is going to run out of money to fund R&D is just to not even understand what's going on.
How Intel and AMD spend R&D is structurally different. AMD is fabless so they only have to focus their R&D exclusively on chip design. Intel has to build foundries, fund manufacturing R&D, as well as chip design.
It's a bit ghoulish but Intel's saving grace may be an invasion of Taiwan.
On the flipside this is also why Intel is more profitable per chip in the long run - they own their own fabs, the cut AMD pays to TSMC to make their chips (cost, profit, and research/overhead) stays with intel. And intel is somehow still making chips with near performance parity to AMD several nodes behind on 10nm+++ - when intel catches up they will again kick AMD on multiple levels.
Intel is in a good place. The question people should be asking is why its so close at all if AMD is several nodes ahead. why is 5nm and 6nm TSMC only competitive with intel and not crushing it? Their performance per watt at high load (and not at idle) is AMDs biggest differentiator. When intel goes to smaller nodes they'll gain more thermal headroom to pack more and faster cores than AMD.
The current modern tech youtubers are asking many of the wrong questions. I watched gamersnexus crowing about AMD efficiency in the highest tier chips and asked "people buying race cars care about speed more than efficiency - why are you downplaying intel's ultrafast chips on 10nm+++ vs amd's smaller and more efficient nodes, and talking about their fuel mileage for a market segment differentiated by performance?"
It's even worse than that - the youtubers don't compare like for like. They should pick a common state for comparison (eg. same power or same performance), instead it's just a free for all, and whoever picks the lower power cap has better efficiency, whoever picks the higher has better performance.
CPU efficiency is so nonlinear at high power levels as to make comparison meaningless if they aren't matched.
this is bad because certain market segments, like the most profitable consumer ones, are differentiated by performance not performance per watt. Picking an arbitrary power cap and testing them both there will tell you which is most efficient, which is a bit like telling a lamborghini customer that your honda gets better gas mileage - its not something he really cares about.
CPU efficiency is an interesting number to the tech youtubers who focus on it, but is not that market differentiator at the highest end most profitable part of the market, and only matters to them. The AMD 7950x is very fast chip which is much more efficient than its intel counterpart, but at the top end of the market what matters is who performs better, not their fuel mileage. You'd be investigating a number interesting to testers but not consumers likely to buy those products - its a waste of time and effort.
I agree, if I'm buying a top-end consumer chip I only really care about raw performance - finishing a compilation run 20s faster 20x a day or running my Grand strategy game faster in the laggy endgame :P.
I guess from a practical perspective, if you aren't modifying the chip clocks then yeah, they are talking about the right thing. But from a technical perspective, I'm more interested in the underlying architecture performance, which is to say:
If the intel chip is set to a Power Limit of 100w, and the AMD chip is set to a Power Limit of 100w, what does performance look like then? Because it's nearly meaningless to run one processor at 250w and the other at 150w, then say the 150w chip is more efficient. Processor power skyrockets at high voltages and clocks, so likely the intel chip can use 50% less power for 10% less performance, if desired - Intel merely made the (correct, imo) calculus that maximal performance is more important than efficiency for this class of chip.
I think we pretty much agree - I just think it would be interested to have a more accurate architectural efficiency/performance comparison (which would also help when choosing eg. a laptop where those numbers DO matter)
I think that performance per watt measurement ONLY applies to the budget end of the market. I'm not buying underlying architecture, I'm buying a CPU with a stated performance. If you're buying budget parts and pinching pennies for electricity its certainly relevant. If you're choosing between an AMD 7950x and an intel i9-13900k, its stupid and doesn't matter.
As I said before, the efficiency per watt is a youtuber number. Nobody who is buying chips really cares, or if they care they watch the youtubers who talk about it nonstop already. It's the youtubers bringing it up on top tier chips who are just out to lunch and not understanding the actual selling to a market and distorting things because of numbers they care about that class customers don't.
I don't care what a 7950x does at 100w, because if I wanted that performance I would have bought a cheaper chip. It's a stupid nonsensical number unrelated to why people buy $700 high end CPUs. You don't buy that chip to save $3 worth of electricity.
Again, I am mostly interested because it would be representative of architectural efficiency to perform such a test. If the top-spec processor is more efficient at a given power level than another, the same applies to lesser processors as well, in general (in particular, laptops and the like)
This comparison is meaningless though if the processors aren't running at the same power, however :(
