Which brand of CPU to buy is a common question, which I’ll preface with the advice that you should ultimately buy a specific CPU based on its own merits, not its brand. That said, there are some general use cases that favor one brand of CPU over the other.

Intel and AMD Have Different Approaches to CPUs

While AMD and Intel both serve more or less the same market, they have markedly different ways of designing CPUs these days, Intel has adopted a hybrid design, mixing performance and efficiency cores into the same chip, and doing away with hyperthreading in their modern CPUs.

AMD, on the other hand, has retained multithreading and offers CPUs where all the cores are identical. Whether one approach or the other is better remains to be seen, but it does mean that these CPUs broadly have different strengths and weaknesses.

Windows Laptop? Buy Intel

Thanks to their hybrid approach, I feel that laptop buyers in general should more often than not opt for an Intel system. In the past I would have recommended laptops with AMD’s APUs for their additional graphical power, but Intel’s last few generations of CPUs have competent GPUs in them for most purposes.

If you’re buying a gaming laptop rather than a general purpose or business machine, then an AMD system with a discrete AMD GPU is fair game, but outside of gaming laptops where the specific laptop’s performance is all that matters, Intel is generally the better choice in my opinion thanks to those efficiency cores.

Of course, if efficiency and battery life are really what you care about, consider ditching AMD and Intel both for a Windows on ARM laptop. Assuming the software you want to use will run properly on such a system.

Gaming Desktop? Buy AMD

While there’s nothing wrong with gaming using one of Intel’s latest hybrid CPUs, if the only thing you do is gaming and your other needs don’t demand it, then AMD’s CPUs are the way to go. In particular, AMD’s X3D series of CPUs offer superlative gaming performance at lower prices than Intel, leaving more money in your budget for a better GPU, faster SSD, or more RAM. As of this writing, the AMD Ryzen 9 9800X3D is the fastest gaming CPU money can buy. Period.

Professional Multitasker? Buy Intel

Intel’s CPUs have big core counts these days, thanks to all those small efficiency cores thrown in alongside the performance ones. This makes them excellent at running lots of apps at the same time, running lots of processes in the background, or running multi-threaded jobs like video rendering, or streaming video compression.

You’ll often see benchmarks where similarly-priced Intel and AMD CPUs trade blows in single-core performance, or in apps like games that don’t use many threads, but then the Intel CPU will pull ahead in jobs where all of its cores are engaged. There are professional CPUs like the AMD Threadripper series that boast many high-performance cores, but in the mainstream, Intel still has the edge for multitasking. So if you need to do video editing during the day, and want to play a game at night, Intel’s the more suitable option in general.

Want an Upgrade Path? Buy AMD

AMD has promised support for its current AM5 CPU socket standard at least until 2027, and (knowing AMD) probably a little beyond that. So, if you build an AM5 desktop system today, you’ll have CPU options for years to come. Intel has a pretty poor track record of keeping the same socket for more than a generation or two, so if you care about an upgrade path, AMD’s the only game in town in my opinion.

Average Computer User? Buy Whatever’s Cheapest

If you don’t have any particular use case and you just want a general purpose computer for browsing the web and doing office work, then buy whichever CPU or system costs the least. Any modern CPU in a modern PC with an SSD as its main drive will have more performance than you need for basic tasks.

If you really need guidance, we can show you how to choose a CPU for everyday computing, but largely it should be your budget that drives you.