If you had the choice...

[philehidiot]

My world is spinning which is quite interesting as I can't see straight but I can still touch type.

I can't safely chop onions but I can definitely talk rubbish online. Funny that.

So, to make the assumption that you have considered and disregarded the AMD platform for whatever reason (although this would be my personal preference as you get PCI-e 4 as well which is great for futureproofing as well as far more chance they won't mess you around on sockets)...

I'd go with moar cores. Back in the day of Intel dominance, AMD throwing more cores at their problems was just patching over their issues and as a result, no one with serious performance needs touched AMD and therefore real multithreading took a while to take off as programmers of high end software were not optimising for AMD's lacklustre, weirdly constructed CPUs. So more cores hasn't been the advantage it perhaps should be as games manufacturers liked to pump out one decent thread and rely on the IPC throughout. Hence Intel used to be best for gaming, no questions asked (although at a significant cost and AMD CPUs did present an excellent performance/£ proposition). I'd say that has now changed and games are now pumping out a few decent threads and you'd be bonkers to get anything less than 4 cores for gaming.

I'd then ignore the above as being irrelevant babble and remove gaming from the equation as both chips are more than capable of handling games now and into the future. Anandtech did an article on what CPUs are best for gaming and there was little difference at decent resolutions between an i3 and the higher spec CPUs. If gaming is your thing, throw more money at the GPU.

So, to Photoshop. There may be questions about multithreaded use now, but we finally have real competition in the high performance CPU "space" and we are seeing seriously high performance, comsumer and workstation chips, which can really scale performance properly and overclock / boost themselves on the fly on all cores (rather than one core at the expense of the others). As a result, even if there are current questions over multithreading performance, this is liable to change within the lifespan of your CPU of choice.

Given the clockspeed difference isn't that much, I'd go for MOAR cores.

I'd also consider that other applications are becoming properly multithreaded and so, whilst the small increase in clock speed would be nice all the time, the performance of the slightly slower CPU will be more than adequate. Then imagine what happens when someone releases an update which takes their software from single to multithreaded... that is a performance bump worth having. It's not going to run 4x faster but it'll scale pretty well if they've done it right with a suitable workload.

I'd also go for AMD. Just sayin'.

Also, remember that the Intel boost system has some serious limitations which you need to be aware of in comparison to AMD. For gaming it is certainly worth considering the base clock over the boost clock due to the nature of the workload. See below:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/13544...cted-tdp-turbo

[rob4001]

Whilst this gaming a photoshop AMD sounds good I do have some caveats. AMD bios support from motherboard manufactures is slow anything below the expensive x570. Linux kernels are having problems on the new 3000 series. The boost clock is an issue. AMD readying a fix but then you're at the mercy of motherboard manufacturers to bring out the update on their bios. X570 should ok but the rest not so sure.

Intel platform is mature and everything should work well. Gaming will change but until the new 8c 16T chips are out on the ps5 and xbox you won't see a big push for multiple core thread until then. 4c chips still have a few years life in them.

[Xlucine]

Whilst this gaming a photoshop AMD sounds good I do have some caveats. AMD bios support from motherboard manufactures is slow anything below the expensive x570. Linux kernels are having problems on the new 3000 series. The boost clock is an issue. AMD readying a fix but then you're at the mercy of motherboard manufacturers to bring out the update on their bios. X570 should ok but the rest not so sure.

Intel platform is mature and everything should work well. Gaming will change but until the new 8c 16T chips are out on the ps5 and xbox you won't see a big push for multiple core thread until then. 4c chips still have a few years life in them.

Bios updates to run 3rd gen are widely available on all boards (even the cheapest models), and the boost clock's not an issue - ryzen was doing the same thing for the reviewers when they found it beating intel so soundly in all the reviews

Right now, games show improvements with >4 cores (as shown in any CPU review) - it's already getting worse for 4 core systems, and this will continue

[philehidiot]

Whilst this gaming a photoshop AMD sounds good I do have some caveats. AMD bios support from motherboard manufactures is slow anything below the expensive x570. Linux kernels are having problems on the new 3000 series. The boost clock is an issue. AMD readying a fix but then you're at the mercy of motherboard manufacturers to bring out the update on their bios. X570 should ok but the rest not so sure.

Intel platform is mature and everything should work well. Gaming will change but until the new 8c 16T chips are out on the ps5 and xbox you won't see a big push for multiple core thread until then. 4c chips still have a few years life in them.

The AMD issue is a non issue in comparison to the Intel boost system. Intel ONLY guarantee the base clock and there are huge limits on the boost to keep within TDPs. So this AMD thing where their system which is supposed to overclock to the limit of the CPU for as long as it can handle being ~75MHz down on the maximum quoted is a nothing. Because it's the maximum, just like Intel. And when you have a load of people running the test under uncontrolled conditions, of course you're going to get some which can't get anywhere near.

Intel has a vaguely mature platform in the sense that to respond to Ryzen they just slammed a load of mature cores together and hoped and it was a mess. An absolute mess. They've got better since but their platform isn't really mature in my book.

The motherboard is a good point. Last time I checked there's only the X570 stupidly expensive mobos available for the 3xxx CPUs and I would absolutely expect any BIOS updates to be applied to them. The lower tier boards aren't out. Saying you're not going to get a fix is really missing the point as that's part of the lower mobo cost - post purchase support. My PC has a decent mobo in but did not get the recent Intel security updates... not because Intel didn't release it, but because the price I paid for the mobo didn't cover updates that far down the line... You pays your money, you takes your choice. It's like mobile phones... part of the cost of expensive flagships is the ongoing support being better. Lower tier phones just don't get it as fast or as often.

Judging a platform which misses the maximum stated clocks by <1% in a completely uncontrolled study is incredibly harsh and frankly headline grabbing. Both AMD and Intel have their issues but at the moment, AMD are definitely up front. Linux Kernel issues are likely due to the lack of resources AMD has and as a result, they prioritise Windows and fix Linux later. Makes a lot of sense given the market share.

I'll almost certainly be getting an AMD chip once my existing Intel platform dies. I've been on Intel only since the original Core series. If they hadn't been so prickish in their socket changes, they would have had so much more money from me as I'd have upgraded CPU many more times. Due to that arrogance, I've upgraded twice rather than 3 or 4 times. I'd say the maturity / longevity of the AM4 socket is a big reason to be drawn to AMD this time round, having had a break from them since the Athlon64.

[Shante]

6 cores @ 4GHz with HT100%