For nearly 20 years, microprocessing companies Intel and AMD have fought neck and neck for the crown of better performance. AMD was slowly pulling ahead in the two-horse race, until Intel released the Core 2 Duo chipset in 2006. Ever since then, AMD has been struggling to stay in the race, with Intel seeing much more sales and AMD seeing less sales.

In the world of processors ,the chip that processes instructions gathered from the code in programs, the two companies have code names for each of their new chipsets. For example, Intel’s latest chipset is title “Kaby Lake” and the chipset before that was titled “Skylake.” AMD’s new chipset is called “Ryzen.”

With the new chipset, AMD looks to slash the prices on all of their processors, pricing their “Ryzen 1700X” for $400 as a competitor to the Intel counterpart “Core i7-6800K” priced at $450. Most notably, all of the Ryzen processors feature eight cores and 16 threads which can only be matched by the Intel i7-5960X ($1,100), i7-6900K ($1,100) and a number of more expensive chips in Intel’s “Xeon” line of processors.

At a first preview in December 2016, AMD claimed that the 1800X chip could out-perform Intel’s i7-6900k by about 10 percent. Several students at MVHS have built computers and have also had to make the decision between AMD and Intel for their processor.

As junior Rohan Venugopal says, “You’ll get the same power for half the price with AMD’s new processors.” This means that AMD’s $500 chip will out perform the $1000 chip by Intel. $500 will get one amazing chip by today’s standards. The choice here is clear — AMD Ryzen.

“I think the new AMD chipset will be a good investment and will be worth your time,” senior Nathan Wong said.

But why does this matter?

Ever since Intel has taken the crown in performance, they have been able to aggressively price their processors, knowing that people would buy their chips, instead of the under-performing AMD. If Ryzen ends up performing as AMD says it will, the two-horse race will now be back in AMD’s favor.