Zen 3 Launch and Zen History in Relation to Intel.
(This article is for people who are already familiar with the basics of CPU’s. If you are not familiar, it may be challenging to understand.)
AMD, one of the largest tech companies, has recently unveiled their new CPU’s, which are based on the revised zen 2 architecture and have completely obliterated their biggest competitor, Intel. Ever since zen 1 came out, AMD has been getting better and better with every revision; zen 1 came out with more cores for less than the competition, but that did not mean that the CPUs were better in every way.
For one, the clocks were abysmal compared to Intel, and the architecture was a lot less fine-tuned, so the low price was the only thing attracting people to that processor.
The next revision, named zen+, was much better than the first revision, and it got the eye of many more people because, unlike zen 1, the clocks were significantly better and the architecture lithography was lowered once again, this time to 12nm, which helps thermals, as well as the TDP (thermal design power).
Still, Intel was working on their own architecture, and AMD still had a long way to go to catch up to those Intel clocks.
Last year, Zen 2 came out, and it was very close to Intel chips in almost every way. They had more cores than Intel and they were priced cheaper; at this point, they became the best chip to have because these extra cores really help for numerous modern games because, by offloading background tasks onto them, you reduce stuttering in games from random background applications.
Now, with Zen 3, everything Intel had going for them is gone. AMD now has better peak performance per core, something Intel has always had until now, as well as a better TDP and Architecture; this means that there is no reason to go for Intel.
You may be thinking: With such a lead, did AMD price their products higher? The answer is yes, but only $50 more than Intel’s lineup.
However, even with that markup, AMD is a much better choice, and not just for the previously mentioned reasons. Intel has a bad history of changing the socket every 2 years for their CPUs, which forces the consumer to pay more when upgrading their CPU.
AMD, on the other hand, has maintained the same socket for 4 years now, which saves a lot of money because a CPU may be $400, for example, but you will need to upgrade it every 3 years. If you also need to buy a motherboard, that would add 100-300 more dollars.
TL;DR: AMD has released a new CPU that has beaten Intel in every way, and this is a huge feat that took them 10 years to achieve.
By Alex Chneerov
