Wrapping Things Up: AMD Vs. Intel In Applications And Power
If your computing needs have less to do with games and involve productivity-oriented apps, AMD has the upper hand in budget-friendly performance. Pentium and Celeron processors are fine for lightly-threaded workloads. But the Athlon X4 750K and Athlon II X4 640 are far more capable when it comes to multitasking.
The aging Phenom II design doesn't offer the per-clock performance of Intel's architectures, but its four physical cores blow past the dual-core competition in many of our benchmarks.
Finally, we come back to the Vishera-based FX with three Piledriver modules. The overclocked -6350 finishes several tasks faster than our Core i5-3570K control processor. Overall, it ends up a few percentage points behind. AMD's FX-6300/6350 simply crushes the similarly-priced Core i3s in our benchmarks, and AMD’s unlocked multipliers make the beat-down even more severe.
And then things get a little ugly. Although it leads AMD's other processors, the Athlon X4 750K consumes more power than even Intel's quad-core Core i5. Insofar as efficiency is concerned, AMD is still a couple of generations behind.