When AMD introduced the first Ryzen desktop processors in 2017, the chips’ secret weapon was the cores. AMD couldn’t match Intel in terms of instructions per clock or achieve the same clock speed, but it could sell you six or eight reasonably capable processor cores for the same price Intel charged for four.
12-core and 16-core variants came out a couple of years later, bringing high performance workstations to much less expensive PCs and forcing Intel to follow suit. This has reduced costs. In 2014, an 8-core processor cost $999 on top of an expensive workstation motherboard; today, you can get 8-core chips for less than $300 and stick them in an $80 board if you like.
Five years after the debut of Ryzen, the sneaker has changed. AMD now has the technology lead in terms of instructions per clock, CPU manufacturing, and power efficiency. But by adding more cores to solve the problem and pricing its chips aggressively, Intel has put together a desktop line that is easier to recommend than AMD, even though AMD has just unveiled its fastest line of desktop processors.
“More cores”isn’t all there is to Intel’s 13th-generation “Raptor Lake”processors, but it’s pretty darn close. Given the similarities to the previous generation of chips and the increase in Intel’s power consumption figures, I didn’t expect these new processors to be impressed. Color me wrong – Zen 4 and Ryzen 7000 are more interesting, but 13th-gen Intel chips are much easier to recommend.