AMD vs. Intel Benchmarks

[IsaacC]

Hi,

I am new to this subject of evaluating processors and ranking them and I have a question. It seems that in recent times it has become in-style to hate Intel. Everyone mocks them and sings the praises of AMD (for example this article among many others: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Humili....489519.0.html). Looking at CPU Benchmarks it does seem like AMD gets higher overall ratings than Intel for CPUs in the same price range. For instance, the Intel Core i7-10700 is rated at 17518, whereas the AMD Ryzen 7 3700X is rated at 22778 (source for Intel: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php....90GHz&id=3747) (source for AMD: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php...+3700X&id=3485). However, I don't understand the justification for this. Both processors seem to have 8 cores and 16 threads. As far as single thread ratings the Intel CPU appears to be far superior!

I understand that these average ratings are complicated. I saw another thread on here where David briefly explains how they are calculated. But surely Single Thread Performance should count for something. Even if AMD is better at other things, isn't single thread performance a key thing for the average user?

Also, I've noticed that on other processors AMD just has more cores while Intel has the better ones (if I'm not mistaken). But then doesn't it just become a quality vs. quantity thing? I don't know anything about how CPUs are made, but wouldn't it be easier to just stuff a bunch of cores on a chip rather than have to make sure they actually have top performance?

In any case, what I have trouble understanding is, is it really better for performance to have 128 threads that each have a single thread rating of 2500 (as the thread ripper does)? On my computer, it looks like many programs I use will only use one thread for their task, even if there are other available unused threads. They just won't divide their workload. So why would it be better for an average user to have a CPU with more cores that provide only mediocre performance?


Thank you very much,
Isaac

[David (PassMark)]

First step in any comparison should be deciding what you use the computer for.
Gaming, EMail, video editing, 3D rendering, programming, etc...
That will to some degree dictate what is important in your CPU. In some cases the conclusion will that the CPU doesn't matter too much at all and a fast hard drive and fast internet matter a lot more.

Even if you have applications that only user 1 thread, there will be occasions when you run 2 or 3 of them at the same time.

The more cores you have the less software there is that will take full advantage of them. By the time you get to 128 cores, there is nearly no software that will use all the cores.
For general use in the current market 6 fast cores is more than enough for most people.

From a users point of view, with typical tasks, they would barely notice the difference between the Intel Core i7-10700 and Ryzen 7 3700X. They are both good CPUs. Better disk speed and low latency internet is where people really notice the difference.

[IsaacC]

Hi David,


Thanks for responding. You wrote that for most people Internet speed and SSD are more important. But after those are factored out, will software using only one core run noticeably faster (e.g. an emulator like qemu, or a compiler that uses just one thread) on the Intel than the AMD?

[David (PassMark)]

Most compilers use more than 1 thread.
QEMU V3 also supports threading.

But yes, out of those two CPUs the Intel one is slightly faster in single thread (~10%). Which is barely going to be noticeable without some careful measurement.

[sunny]

Hi,
I am wondering what confinguration to choose AMD or Intel based that I will have faster PC (desktop) for working with haeavy excel files ( more than 600K rows and 30-40 columns ,size in excel format *.xlsx - 30-100MB).

I will use Office 2019 or Office 365 also I would like to use on the PC programs as Power BI - desktop, and other programs for BI.

In the moment what I noticed that when I try to put some new column e.g. it takes a several minutes (my current CPU is intel i5-4460) excel in not responding and cpu usage in Task manager for Excel .EXE is 25% ( OS Win 10 - 64bit, Excel 2019 - 64 bit).

Could someone give me an advise in what new configuration ( CPU, MB-chipset, SSD) it is worth more to invest?

Should I watch as a pointer single thread performance of the CPU?

Thank you in advance.

[David (PassMark)]

There are a couple of old posts here about Excel and Multi-threading
https://forums.passmark.com/pc-hardw...xcel-data-sets
https://forums.passmark.com/pc-hardw...excel-workbook
Conclusion was, that some spreadsheets can benefit from threading, with modern versions of Excel. But testing with your specific spreadsheet is required.

The i5-4460 was a 4 core CPU. So getting 25% CPU load implies your spreadsheet is single threaded with the specific operation you did (add a column). Maybe try a few other of your common operations (e.g. sorting, cell update, etc..) and if they are all single threaded, then get the faster single threaded CPU you can afford.

Also, I would also note that while excel is good a general purpose calculations, you might get 10x the performance by writing an optimised app to do exactly what you want. This can be expensive however so it really depends on how often you use the spreadsheet as to if it makes sense.