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The difference
between AMD and Intel CPUs is mainly efficiency. A processor can only do
one instruction per clock cycle. However, most operations require a
whole string of instructions to carry out. Thus, there are two ways to
make a CPU faster: Either make it perform more operations per second
(run at a higher clock rate), or reduce the number of steps per
instruction. To use an analogy, if we're trying to drive from point A to
point B, we can make the trip go faster either by getting a faster car,
or by driving a shorter route.
Intel has chosen to build faster CPUs. They're running really fast, at
up to 3.8 gigahertz. (That's 3.8 Billion instructions per second). On
the other hand, AMD tends more towards the efficient end. While their
CPUs are slower (maxing out at 2.8 gigahertz), most of their operations
are short enough that the slightly slower AMD cpu gets done before the
Intel CPU. Effectively, the Intel CPU has a very long to-do list, and it
goes through each item quickly, while the AMD CPU has a shorter to-do
list, but it takes more time to do each item.
The only times that the differences between AMD and Intel CPUs will show
up is when you're doing very CPU-intensive tasks. At the moment, AMD
CPUs are slightly faster at gaming than Intel CPUs, while the opposite
is true when you're running heavy-duty number-crunching programs. The
difference between the two is very small, and you probably wouldn't
notice it unless you had two systems running side-by-side.
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