Brendan Peachey

Brent Sensei
Computer Engineering Per. 2
Sept.9.2015
AMD vs. Intel
When you think about building your first low budget gaming computer for the first time
you think it seems easy, just pick a part put it together and there you go right? Well youre wrong
when you start building a computer there are so many companies and choices of every part.
Especially the processor department between Intel and AMD with prices.

Well to start off there is much more inside a CPU besides the clock speed (GHZ) and the
number of cores inside it. There are logic units, caches, registers, and pathways. Everything a
CPU processes has to be perfect or it may stop working, reboot, or just shut down. That is why
you need to pick the best processor for the money so you dont buy a CPU that will shut down on
you repetitively.

The CPU works by computing instructions in certain orders such as A, B, C and D so it

doesnt fail. That is where I got my statement of how a CPU can fail and shut down. The
instructions need to go through the correct order and if they fail to compute the whole system
will shut down just like parts in a computer itself. There are processors used for certain things
like AMD CPUs are good for transferring small amount of data quickly but Intel CPUs can
transfer a large amount of data but it takes slightly longer to transfer the data.

You may be wondering why would I want to know this? There are some job
opportunities for studying CPUs and how they work. You can work at Intel or AMD and create
processors. There are also some computer building companies like iBuypower, CyperpowerPC
and Digital Storm that pre-built computers and send them to you. It may be outside of processor
chips specialty but you will have to experiment with them a lot.

There are a lot of college opportunities for computer engineering all over the nation. Like
Princeton which is ranked number 9 for computer engineering that is $40,000 for tuition. There
are some colleges that if you are from the state you get an in-state tuition which can save you
thousands for the same education.

Now that we have talked about what the processor does lets check out some benchmarks
comparing budget AMD processors with budget Intel CPUs. I searched up some low ranged
CPU benchmarks on a specialized website and it came out with an Intel Core Duo T2250
clocked at 1.73 GHZ on top. There was also another Intel processor underneath it and the closest
AMD processor was the AMD Opteron 252 clocked at 2.6 GHZ which between AMD and Intel
the GHZ seems to be on AMDs side but in reality it doesnt help enough with the other parts of
the processor to keep up with Intel.

I have talked to people with experience on the topic such as Taylor Kimura and A.J. the
tech person that works at Island Pacific Academy. They both told me they have had good
experiences with Intel. However A.J. told me that AMD is a newer company. So Intel has more
experience with building processors which doesnt necessarily make them the best but they will
know more of what they are doing and will have the upper hand.

Overall in my personal opinion Intel is a more trusted company and they have powerful
processors for the price. Even though you may have to go up a few dollars it is worth it for the
power you get from Intel. If you would want to try AMD go for it there is a 3 year warranty for
the processors and a 2 year warranty for FX series processors. Intel also has a 3 year warranty
but that is for all of their processors. At the end of the day Intel is the processor company you
want to go by if you want higher reliability and higher power.

Sources:

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/320485-28-intel-considered
http://www.geek.com/chips/why-amd-mhz-dont-equal-intel-mhz-557914/
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/low_end_cpus.html
http://www.intel.com/support/processors/sb/CS-020033.htm
http://support.amd.com/en-us/search/faq/137
http://www.greatvaluecolleges.net/affordable/computer-science-engineering/