AMD vs Intel: Which CPUs Are Better in 2022?

 

If you're looking for the best CPUs for Gaming or the best workstation CPU, there are only two choices to pick from – AMD and Intel. That fact has spawned an almost religious following for both camps, and the resulting AMD vs Intel flamewars make it tricky to get unbiased advice about the best choice for your next processor. But in many cases, the answer is actually very clear. In fact, for most users, it's now a blowout win in Intel's favor, as you can see in our CPU Benchmarks Hierarchy. That's a fast reversal of fortunes for the chipmaker after its decade of dominance was completely overturned by AMD's Ryzen 5000 chips. It also gives Intel a leg up as we head into the Raptor Lake and Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 era.

This article covers the never-ending argument of AMD vs Intel desktop CPUs (we're not covering laptop or server chips). We judge the chips on seven criteria based on what you plan to do with your PC, pricing, performance, driver support, power consumption, and security, giving us a clear view of the state of the competition. We'll also discuss the lithographies and architectures that influence the moving goalposts. Overall, there's a clear winner, but which CPU brand you should buy depends mostly on what kind of features, price, and performance are important to you.

If you're looking for the fastest overall chips on the market, you should look to Intel's potent new Alder Lake series. Even though AMD clings to the distinction of having the single fastest gaming chip available, Intel's Alder Lake chips take the gaming crown from AMD in all of the most important price bands. Alder Lake also rivals or beats AMD in all meaningful performance metrics, like single- and multi-threaded productivity workloads. You can see the disruptive results in our Intel Core i9-12900K and Core i5-12600K review, and we've also added both our Windows 10 and 11 testing to our CPU benchmark database. We've also thrown in results with both DDR4 and DDR5 memory for good measure. 

Intel's Alder Lake has completely redefined x86 desktop PC chips with a new hybrid architecture that delivers amazing levels of performance. Not to be upstaged, AMD released its Ryzen 7 5800X3D, a new CPU with 3D V-Cache. This chip takes the overall leadership spot for gaming, if only by a slight percentage, courtesy of an almost-unthinkable 96MB of L3 cache bolted onto the souped-up processor.

You can see how all of these processors stack up in our AMD vs Intel CPU Benchmarks Hierarchy, but the landscape had changed in the wake of AMD's Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 9 5900X, not to mention the Ryzen 5 5600X. At their debut, the Ryzen 5000 series were the highest-performing chips on the market and beat Intel in every metric that matters, including gaming, application performance, power consumption, and thermals, but Intel's successful Alder Lake counterattack swung the tables in Team Blue's favor.

AMD recently released six other new Zen 3 chips to shore up its defenses against Alder Lake, but we've found that they don't impact the competitive positioning much. AMD also has its Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 chips coming before the end of September. Intel also has its Raptor Lake chips coming, and they're expected in October. That means the AMD vs Intel battle could shift very soon, but this is the tale of the tape for the current state of the market.

Here are the results of our analysis and testing. In the following sections, we'll go over the in-depth details of how we came to our conclusions for each category.

AMD's relentless onslaught with its Zen-based processors has redefined our expectations for both the mainstream desktop and the HEDT markets, originally catching Intel flatfooted as it remained mired on the 14nm process and Skylake architectures. The past several years have seen AMD CPUs go from value-focused and power hungry chips to leading-end designs that deliver more cores, more performance, and lower power requirements.

Intel fought back by slowly adding features and cores across its product stack, but that also resulted in negative side effects, like more power consumption and heat generation. That only served to highlight the company's struggles on the design and fabrication side of its operation.

The AMD vs Intel CPU conversation has changed entirely, though, as Intel has now undercut AMD's price-to-performance ratio entirely with the Alder Lake chips. Additionally, Alder Lake comes with the most disruptive change to Intel's CPU overall SoC design methodology, not to mention core architectures, that we've seen in a decade. They also come with the new 'Intel 7' process that has proven to be exceptionally competitive, particularly against AMD's superior process node that comes from TSMC. That shifted our rankings from a 7-to-4 advantage for AMD to a 7-to-5 advantage in Intel's favor.

Intel even moved forward to PCIe 5.0 and DDR5 technologies, leaving AMD's PCIe 4.0 and DDR4 support looking rather dated. DDR5 does add significant cost to motherboards, but Alder Lake also supports DDR4 memory. However, Intel still hasn't eased its draconian segmentation policies that limit features, like overclockability, to pricey chips and motherboards.

Intel's Alder Lake also holds the crown on overclockability. If you spend the cash on a Z690 motherboard, you'll attain far more overclocking headroom than you'll get with the Ryzen 5000 chips. You can see our head-to-head testing in our How to Overclock a CPU feature.

AMD's current mix of price, performance, and value, recently resulted in deep price cuts to its flagship Ryzen 5000 processors. AMD isn't taking the challenge lying down, though, as it recently released its Ryzen 7 5800X3D, a new CPU with 3D V-Cache. This chip takes the overall leadership spot for gaming courtesy of an incredible 96MB of L3 cache bolted onto the souped-up specialized processor that delivers up to 15% more gaming performance on average. However, it still features the Zen 3 architecture, so it lags Intel's processors in more general desktop PC application performance.

Despite AMD's recent refresh, Intel wins the CPU war overall right now. An AMD processor could still be the better choice depending on your needs, like if you prize the lowest power consumption or less-expensive motherboards. For now, if you want the best in gaming or application performance, overclocking or software support, or if you want productivity performance without buying a discrete GPU (see our best graphics cards), Team Blue deserves your hard-earned dollars.