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Comment by Aromasin | Hacker News Reader

Simply out of curiosity, why do you have this sentiment? I've seen it given a lot as the reason why people don't want to buy one yet, but the performance differences are slim compared the current Tiger Lake option; perhaps 10-20% on certain quad core workloads, more if optimized for octa, but worse on single and dual. Additionally, by the time the Ryzen CPU comes along, likely the Alder Lake processor will be released at which point Intel will have the edge performance wise (hybrid cores, DDR5, Xe graphics architecture etc.) Is it brand loyalty or another reason?

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The integrated graphics on AMD is more powerful than Intel with better driver stability in games. Framework doesn't have a dedicated GPU to offset that consideration. AMD in current gens has a better performance per watt, cost and core counts. Biggest issue with AMD on laptops is availability of chips and thunderbolt support.

Hard to compare what is coming with what is currently out, so I won't comment on Alder lake/etc. I am really interested how Xe does as a dGPU but that's outside a laptop context.

Thanks for the reply! For me, it's a preference, like tucked vs untucked. Intel has things outside of the realm of performance that turned me off, so my last few builds have been AMD and I'm generally satisfied.

To your credit, I am typing this from an Intel device that is not my own, and it is performant as you mentioned.

Not sure AMD is any better, but Intel is pretty bad. They're basically a huge monopoly who constantly pushed for anti-features.

Want to own your device? No you don't, Intel does via Management Engine and other universal backdoors. Want to own your system? No you don't, you "need" Intel's microcode to fix all the bugs Intel had on release day [0].

Also, i heard recent AMD processors have tight PCIe integration (> 20 lanes), which if you need a dedicated GPU or network card is a huge bonus, but doesn't matter if you don't.

[0] Yes, i've witnessed with my own eyes CPUs that would fail to boot an OS without Intel's proprietary mirocode.

I don't want to support a company that held back computational advancements for a decade by engaging in anti-competitive practices towards their main competitor then using the gained ground to justify slowing down cpu advancements.

I don't want to support the market segmentation that intel does with ECC and raid. Especially given the single core pref hit you take moving from the mainline i7-i9 cpus to the equivalent xeon ones thats on top of the 2x to 3x mark up for no reason.

In short there is an ethical issue with buying intel some people want to avoid.

AMD has better battery life given that they run cooler at a lower TDP than Intel chips. This is partly due to the processor architecture. So this is one tangible reason to prefer AMD especially in a laptop as battery life is very important.

Genuinely curious: Has this claim been actually realized on similar hardware? There have been many cases where in theory platform XYZ is better than ABC, but then it ends up being worse because of implementation details. E.g. the OS doesn't take advantage of sleep states properly, or a driver bug, or a misconfiguration, etc.

For a while I have been saying "buy AMD now or else later you won't have a choice" (and for laptop we did not have a choice not that long ago, so it's not hard to imagine)

I mostly buy Intel, but more and more nowadays I'm pondering AMD for its support of ECC RAM.

Hope for lesser amount of backdoors.

More cores for running k8s locally.

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