But AMD is a smaller company, and it has been a victim of its own success-AMD Ryzen systems are often harder to find and go out of stock more quickly than Intel PCs.
Ryzen 5, Ryzen 7, and Ryzen 9 processors from the Ryzen 3000, 4000, and 5000 series are all as good as or better than Intel’s processors in both performance and power use (quite a bit better, once you start comparing Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 9 chips against the Intel Core i7 and i9 lineups). We also like desktop processors from AMD, Intel’s biggest competitor in computer processors. And if you just need a basic desktop for editing documents and spreadsheets, browsing the web, and chatting on video calls, the 10th-generation Core i3 processor is an excellent value.
Intel’s 10th-generation desktop processors are still widely available, and they still perform reasonably well for most tasks, including gaming, professional photo and video editing, 3D modeling, and other tasks that benefit from a lot of processor power. And because processors are designed to slow down (or “throttle”) when they get too hot to avoid burning themselves out, that increased heat can often cancel out whatever speed improvements Intel might have achieved by updating the processors’ architecture in the first place. But each of those transistors requires the same amount of electricity as those in 10th-generation processors, and as a result, the 11th-generation processors run hotter and are more difficult to cool down. This means that they can be faster sometimes, since Intel has added more transistors to their design. So what happened to Intel’s latest desktop chips? Compared with the 10th-generation chips, the 11th-generation processors have an updated architecture but not a newer manufacturing process. If you’ve ever wondered why a MacBook Air you can buy today is faster, smaller, thinner, and lighter than a MacBook Air from a decade ago, that’s one major reason. That way, processor designers can add more transistors to make a processor architecture faster without worrying about making it physically larger or more power-hungry. So all else being equal, a processor design with more transistors requires more electricity to run and a bigger fan to cool.īut newer manufacturing processes make transistors smaller, which generally reduces the amount of power required to switch them on and off. As you use the computer, those transistors are all being switched on and off constantly, which requires power, which in turn produces heat.
The transistor count of a typical desktop computer processor has increased from tens of thousands in the late ’70s to billions today.
One way to make a processor faster is by adding more transistors to the design-a transistor is the basic building block of a computer processor, and the more of them you have, the more your processor can do. Those two concepts are deeply intertwined. This illustration is abstracted, but it’s more or less how a modern processor looks-it’s one solid chunk of silicon, with different pieces of the chip dedicated to different tasks.
And then there’s the manufacturing process, or how the chip is physically constructed in a chip maker’s factory. First, there’s the chip’s architecture, or how it has been designed-a processor is structured a bit like the blueprint of a house, with processor cores, cache memory, and blocks for playing 3D games or high-definition video files all laid out in a precise arrangement. To understand why these 11th-generation desktop processors are having problems, you need to know a little about how the processors in computers, tablets, phones, and game consoles get better over time. Here’s what you need to know about the problems with these processors, what you should look for instead if you’re shopping for a desktop PC, and why, in contrast, we believe Intel’s 11th-generation laptop processors are safe to buy. Specifically, the 11th-generation Core i5, i7, and i9 processors that will be available in many desktop computers in the next couple of months are difficult to recommend because they are only a little faster than the 10th-generation processors they replace, and because they run much hotter and use much more electricity than either those 10th-generation processors or competing AMD Ryzen chips do. But Intel’s 11th-generation Core processors are a little different, and there are some models we don’t think you should buy. And every year, we’ve recommended that people buy the newest version they can get-if you’re paying hundreds or thousands of dollars for a computer, you should get one that will feel fast and run all the apps you use for as long as possible. Every year for the past decade, Intel has released a new generation of its Core processors.