The competition between Intel and AMD is the competition between tortoise and hare. Which company is turtle? Which company is rabbit?

During the past few release cycles, the battle of reviews between Intel and AMD fans has been intense, with a lot of digital ink discussing which company has improved significantly or not over the years. There is also some comment on the original performance of the two companies' fastest processors.

We think it's interesting to delve into each company's fastest desktop / CPU's archive performance benchmark, so that we can have a good understanding of each company's actual performance over the years, and even see if there are any patterns to collect or make some bets on the future.

Let's start with some tables before we go into the chart

The calculation of enthusiasts in the past 20 years

Although Intel and AMD launch a large number of processors each year for different prices and target markets, we are limited to the fastest desktops o

Even people like me who have been as a system builder throughout the period, assembling such lists is a huge pain, let alone matching test results. This is particularly difficult in AMD, as AMD do not really match Intel's Ark to provide a single list of processors, sorted by generation, type, and release date. If you think I chose the wrong one for the yea

We should address some of the anomalies in the chart

Intel also experienced several failures between 2013 and 2017, though not as serious or as long. The fifth generation core series basically died in 2014, although the fourth generation Core i7 series updates did provide significant performance improvements. Two years later, it was another trend technically - the Kaby lake with core i7-7700k didn't really start until January 2017. We made up a little bit to make Kaby lake into 2016, because otherwise it would disappear completely. Coffee lake and i7-8700k appeared later in the same year.

Rise and fall of AMD Athlon :2001-2007

It's hard to believe now, but there was a time when multithreaded workloads were much more pushy than single threaded workloads. But it wasn't a long time ago.

In 2001-2005, the era of Athlon XP and Athlon 64 vs Pentium 4-amd dominated the dual threaded workload. In 2006, Intel's penti um965 changed that balance.

Even in the Athlon era, amd can't catch up with Intel in single thread performance. Its Athlon 64 x2 processor once led, but Intel regained the lead with the core 2 Extreme QX9650.

This is something many of us forgot in the early 21st century – multitasking is too bad. in the first chart above, we are studying the ratio between multithreading and single thread Passmark CPU benchmark scores. For the year 2001-2005, the CPU, single thread score is actually higher than multithreading, which means you can do more computing work on a single thread at a given time, rather than decomposing into parallel threads.

And you might think that's because they' re still single-core, single-threaded CPU, but you're wrong. Intel introduced 1 c/2t Pentium 4 in 2002 2.8 GHz hyperthreading, which has little impact on actual multithreading capabilities. AMD launched the first truly dual-core desktop CPU in 2005

The multi Intel's 2006 Pentium Extreme 965(dual-core/four-threaded CPU), the multithreading ratio did not exceed 100 percent

Even in this golden age of AMD, Intel beat AMD in terms of single threaded performance. Pentium 4 architecture, as a weaker successor of Pentium III, has been roundly and properly ridiculed, and Pentium III tends to outperform it on a hourly basis. However, the clock frequency of Pentium III cannot reach the level of Pentium 4, and, in any case, the highest performance workload of the era is single threaded, and Intel's Pentium 4 is ahead of AMD's Athlon in performance. Although the CPU performance of the latter is very weak.

Unfortunately for Intel, as early as 2001, the world had turned to multitasking operating systems, and multithreaded workloads emerged, as evidenced by the use of tabbed browsing in 2002 by Phoenix, the predecessor of Firefox. With CPU saturation, users are getting used to the environment of opening many programs all day. Multithreading performance (rather than single thread) becomes an urgent task.

AMD and Intel launched a real four-core desktop CPU. in 2007 High-level CPU multithreaded performance peaked at both vendors

The new four core CPU has enough multitasking performance, which can handle low priority background tasks and high priority foreground tasks at the same time, without obvious damage to foreground tasks, which shifts the focus to single thread performance. This is especially unfortunate for AMD, because Intel has not only improved multithreading performance, but QX9650 has also made a breakthrough in single threaded performance.

With nearly 70% of single-threaded performance advantages being replaced by Intel's qx9650, and focus suddenly returning to the dominance of single-threaded performance, at least in these high-end CPU

Intel counterattack: 2007-2013

Compared with i7-965 extreme in 2008, Intel's i7-975 extreme in 2009 is not much improved, but the 2010 hex core i7-980x is a melting pot. At the same time, although amd has made steady progress year after year, it is still at a disadvantage.

Intel has a single-threaded advantage over AMD throughout 2007-2013 and is usually quite a bit of an advantage.

2007-2013 was an exciting time to improve CPU performance and functionality, but it was quite boring in terms of the battle between Intel and AMD. Intel has been leading the way in terms of single threaded and multithreaded performance.

In the whole running process of phenom and phenom II architecture, amd has achieved steady growth in multi-threaded and single threaded performance. In this way, it can almost catch up with Intel in single threaded performance, but it has never been close to Intel in terms of multithreading.

Both companies released their first six core CPU in 2010, but AMD's x61100t uses the same K10 architecture as the x4965 in 2009. Intel's i7-980x not only achieves chip reduction, but also adds a new set of AES instructions. This nearly tripled Intel's multithreading performance, while still maintaining a small single thread boot time.

In 2011, amd was fully engaged in multithreading with its ill fated eight core bulldozer architecture. While bulldozer does start to gain a significant position on Intel in the field of multithreading, it comes at a cost. The new fx-8150 actually regresses in single threaded performance.

AMD Bulldozer had become Piledriver, by 2012 and almost caught up in multithreading Intel, but only because Intel reduced its core number from 6 to 4 when reducing its process to 22 nm. AMD has it

To make matters worse in 2013, AMD launched the final PiledriverCPU (abominable FX-9590). While Intel's leading edge in engineering technology continues to improve, the CPU represents a Hail Mary way to stay competitive-it is mainly synchronized with Intel's i7-4770K, but only through clock frequencies and voltages, which usually remain

Compared with 125w of fx-8350 and 84w of i7-4770k, the rated TDP is 225W, and fx-9590 is almost unusable CPU. In typical cases, air cooling is not challenging, and the noise and waste heat of the fans are obnoxious, and even the hard core amd fans can't make excuses for them, especially when their competition is still easy to beat.

FX-9590 is AMD last feverish CPU. in four years Since 2014-2017, Red Team only new CPU version is that none of the budget CPU and APU, is better than FX-9590, let alone competitive.

Change of Destiny: 2013-2020