These Intel and AMD multi-core processors traded blows across all of our CPU tests, but Intel won more often than not. The blue team notched IPC wins in SANDRA's Dhrystone integer tests, Geekbench, POV-Ray, LAME MT, 3DMark, and Middle Earth: Shadow of War. AMD stole single-threaded victories in SANDRA's Whetstone FPU tests, Cinebench, and Y-Cruncher. While not an outright thread-for-thread win for AMD, the company has obviously worked hard to improve 3rd Gen Ryzen performance in lightly-threaded loads, while it's multi-core scaling is downright impressive.

We came into this experiment hoping to learn something about AMD's improvements in instructions-per-cycle (IPC) performance. Our testing bears out that the company has made significant strides in this area. Previously, buying advice was something like, "if you need lots of cores and are pinching pennies, look at AMD Ryzen, but if you need stronger lightly-threaded performance, Intel is king." While Intel still has an overall advantage in low-thread-count situations like the ones we've explored today, the gap has been closed down dramatically. AMD has successfully turned the tables with 3rd Gen Ryzen 3000 series processors that bring a notable IPC lift across the board. You can't go wrong with either Intel or AMD platforms for single-threaded performance, but when you take Ryzen's higher core counts at a given price point into consideration, AMD's new hotness is head-turning and hard to deny.