Finally, there’s the Silent mode, where the AMD platform wins by a major margin, but it also runs at higher power than the Intel model (45W vs 30W). That’s most likely due to the difference in software settings at the times we’ve reviewed the two (we tested the Intel model earlier in the year). Nonetheless, the AMD platform would have an advantage over the Intel hardware anyway if both were to run at 45W of power. If you want the most cutting-edge and powerful gaming CPU available right now, that is offered by Ryzen 9’s 7950X3D chip, though you will have to significantly invest in a new motherboard as well as the chip itself.

At both 1080p and 1440p resolutions, the Core i9-13900K outperforms the Ryzen 9 7950X by 15% and 11%, respectively. When we consider 99th percentile frame rate measurements, it too has a noticeable advantage. The Core i9-13900K is, in the end, the fastest gaming processor money can buy. Broadly speaking, today's laptop processors use either the ARM or x86 architecture. The latter was created by Intel in 1978 and dominates the PC industry, with Intel and AMD battling for market-share supremacy. ARM-based chips, on the other hand, are produced by hundreds of different companies under license from the British firm ARM Limited, owned by Softbank. (For a while, it looked like Nvidia was on the path to acquiring ARM from Softbank, but the chip maker has abandoned its efforts.) Furthermore, if you’re getting an ultrabook that relies solely on the iGPU for graphics, that’s another major selling point for the Ryzen hardware, where the Radeon 680M iGPU demolishes the Iris Xe iGPU available with Intel processors, as shown in this separate comparison. Unfortunately, this doesn’t quite translate to as strong of a single-core performance, even if AMD is closer than it’s ever been to matching Intel core for core. In our single-core GeekBench and Cinebench tests, the Ryzen 9 3900X scored a 5,569 and 203, respectively. This is definitely a huge leap over the Ryzen 7 2700X, but it’s slower than the 9900K, which scored a 6,333 and 211 in the same tests. But, that’s still between a 4% and 13% difference, so the multi-core gains generally outweigh them. Just as it is with desktops, at the heart of every laptop computer is a central processing unit (CPU), commonly called a processor or a chip, that's responsible for nearly everything that goes on inside. The CPUs you'll find in current laptops are made by AMD, Intel, Apple, and Qualcomm. The options may seem endless and their names byzantine. But choosing one is easier than you think, once you know a few CPU ground rules.The Ryzen 9 3900X has 12 cores to the Core i9-9900K's eight, so it gains the upper hand right from the beginning, at least as far as raw specs are concerned for multi-threaded workloads. All else being equal, the more cores a chip has, the better it is able to handle complex workflows from modern software applications, many of which are designed to assign tasks to as many CPU cores and threads as they can lay hands on. The Intel Core i9-13900K vs AMD Ryzen 9 7950X rivalry places Intel’s 13th-Gen Raptor Lake with an x86 hybrid architecture against AMD’s Zen 4 based Ryzen 7000 family for supremacy at the top of the mainstream desktop PC market. As the Intel vs AMD battle enters a new phase, these two fundamentally different approaches have shifted our list of the best CPUs for our needs, but the competition is closer than it appears on the surface. The Intel model scores 15-20% higher in the single-core CPU tests, 10-25% higher in the multi-threaded CPU tests, and the two are about on par in the GPU benchmarks. Although Intel has come a long way, AMD continues to produce the most energy-efficient CPUs. They not only consume less peak power, but they also work more efficiently per unit of electricity used. You’ll have a cooler, quieter system as a result of the overall victory in power consumption, efficiency, and thermal output.

For example, if you're playing a PC game while talking to your friends on Discord, the load of the game will be handled by the P-cores, while the job of processing Discord is sent to the E-cores. This is all done through intelligent scheduling in Windows 11, via a service that Intel is calling Thread Director. The company says it plans to make this technology available only for that operating system. No Windows 10-based Thread Director is set for release. Intel CPU platforms have only added PCI Express 4.0 support with the Z590 chipset, new in 2021, though a few older boards from the Z490 family can support PCIe 4.0 with updates and an 11th Generation CPU. Whether future AMD CPU platforms will get Thunderbolt 3 via new supporting chipsets in the years to come remains to be seen. So, if you really need support for both, it may be worth waiting.

Here, at least on pure specs, the Ryzen 9 3900X wins hands down. It comes with support for 3,200MHz DDR4 memory and a whopping 70MB L3 cache on the die. The Core i9-9900K has lower peak official memory-speed support (2,666MHz) and a much smaller 16MB of L3 cache. But there's more to this argument than just spec numbers. The differences between Ryzen 9 and Intel i9 processors largely come down to architecture. All Ryzen 9 CPUs have Zen 4 architecture while Intel i9 chips carry Raptor Lake. Let’s start with Ryzen. Pricing is where the rubber meets the road. Intel's very aggressive pricing gives it the overall lead against AMD's competing Ryzen 7000 chips, especially if you're building a DDR4 system. AMD only supports DDR5 memory, so you won't have the option for lower-priced memory like you do with the 13900K. Both chips have their respective strengths, and those strengths are important enough differentiators that they could be the make-or-break decision based upon your needs. AMD's Ryzen 9 5900X comes with 12 cores and 24 threads that will leave the 11900K completely outmatched in threaded applications. Meanwhile, the Core i9-11900K comes with 5.3 GHz boost speeds that will equate to faster performance in single-threaded apps, meaning it will be snappier on the desktop.

Once again, the Core i9 prevails on the single-core task but falls a bit behind on the multicore one (though by a bit less time, proportionally, than on Handbrake and Cinebench). Besides raw specs and performance benchmarks, there are several differences in the feature sets for the respective Ryzen 9 and Core i9 platforms that might factor into your buying decision. And here are a couple more Ryzen 9 6900HX and Core i9-12900H models in this same test, to verify our findings on these ROG platforms. Even when AMD chips were crap people kept complaining about the price of Intel and we're telling people to buy the bargain. I listened unfortunately and missed out on a decade of great Intel chips. All the while I had to keep buying a new AMD chip to keep up. Therefore, did I really save money?Both chips are designed to run at their maximum rated thermal specification (100C for Intel, 95C for AMD) during heavy workloads, so you shouldn't be surprised to see them run at these elevated temperatures even when they are paired with the recommended 280mm AIO (or air equivalent) for Intel, or 240mm AIO (or air equivalent) for AMD. However, Intel's system consumes more power, resulting in higher thermal output. Here we can see that the effect of Windows 11 and Thread Director on the Intel Core i9-12900K's benchmark results. In some cases it was within the margin of error, but it did also correct for the issues we saw in HandBrake and POV-Ray during the Windows 10 test set. Moving to Windows 11 also adds a not-insignificant boost to the Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Premiere test runs (using the Puget Systems PugetBench test utilities), which showcases usage scenarios more along the lines of what Intel says Thread Director was made to handle. It is a pity that Lenovo on the L7 2022 platform with AMD processors does not release light versions with 3050/3060 (and 32Gb/2Tb config from factory) with price lower then 6800H/6700M – so many people buy this series not for games, but for work (company buy it in offices) and as a multimedia laptop for home, with a much lower price. And removing the parrot stupid illumination of the case, with which people suffer and immediately turn it off forever. It is better to spend this money on an improved cooling system (liquid metal) and more radiators. On our Cinebench R15 test, which includes both single-core and multi-core workflows, the Ryzen 9 far outpaces the Core i9 when it's using all of its cores and threads. That's a perfectly natural outcome, since the Ryzen 9 has more of them. (Again, that's 12 cores/24 threads for the Ryzen 9, versus eight cores/16 threads for the Core i9.) But the AMD chip is actually slightly behind its Intel competitor when it comes to single-core performance.

Intel uses a Thread Director to coordinate between these cores, ensuring processing tasks are distributed in the most sensible way. This means that i9 processors can achieve incredibly high speeds while maintaining good overall efficiency.Finally, PCI Express 4.0 is standard issue for all motherboards based on B450, B550, or X570 chipsets. Point and round, to AMD. The reference laptop we’ll look at in this article is the Lenovo Legion 7, as one of the very few models available in both Intel and AMD variants, both paired with a full-power RTX 3080 165W Nvidia GPU. Alongside, I’ll also include the Acer Predator Helios 500 (Core i9-11980HK + RTX 3080 165W) and the Asus ROG Scar 17 (Ryzen 9 5900HX + RTX 3080 130W). When it comes to heat, this Ryzen 9 5900X vs Core i9-11900K CPU benchmark comparison is pretty lopsided. Power consumption and heat go hand in hand, and Intel's Core i9-11900K consumes more power than any of the company's previous mainstream processors. In fact, we recorded a peak of 295W during an AVX-512 Prime95 test.