Intel vs AMD?

**ismaelg** · 07-24-2014, 03:13 PM

Hi,

I recall reading or hearing somewhere a while ago a discussion about AMD vs Intel powered PCs. Something that AMD powered machines were not 100% compatible with some softwares like Photoshop or Lightroom. That doesn't make much sense to me but I'm not an expert. Is there any truth about this? If it was on the internet, it must be true right?

Seriously, I'm looking at building myself a new machine, as I have done in the past.

Thanks,
Ismael

**boriscleto** · 07-24-2014, 03:54 PM

AMD had a press release just last month about Photoshop CC getting AMD Acceleration. Both APUs and GPUs.

AMD Acceleration Enhances the Creative Workflows for the Next Wave of Adobe Photoshop CC Features

MarkJerling · 07-24-2014, 03:59 PM

Latest system requirements for Photoshop here: https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/system-requirements.html
You don't need a high spec graphics card such as you'd use for 3D CAD work or for serious gaming.

I use Intel Core i7 and a NVIDEA 4000M graphics card. No problems here.

**interested_observer** · 07-24-2014, 05:02 PM

Generally speaking Intel vs AMD - they are both comparable. I have boxes from both companies in my lab for evaluation - and there are differences that probably only my staff and I can see (or care about for that matter) for the specific work we do.

CPU cores - the more the better. Get at least 4 cores.
Memory - They recommend 8GB - if you can afford it go 16GB. Generally memory is cheap.
Graphic Cards - 1) Get OpenCL compatible, 2) more cores the better, 3) more graphics memory the better
Storage - Yes SSD is the fastest, however spinning media (disks) are still the cheapest (and fast enough). Get at least 1TB, and look for the rotational speed. The faster the disk spins, the quicker you can get to your data. eSATA interfaces have a high transfer rate (near PCIe bus rates).

All in all, you can go into a large box store (Best Buy, Costco, etc.) and find pretty much what you are looking for at a $500 price point. You might not get the absolute optimum setup, but it should be close enough for the price. One note - Most of these boxes use the on chip graphics processor. You can drop in a graphics card (OpenCL), however the OEM power supply in the box will limit your selection. The graphics cards will be the lower tier that will fit within the OEM power supply spec. They are good enough for $50. I have done this 3 times now with boxes from Costco over the years.

About 18 months ago, my son built a nearly no holds barred system for about $900 (took advantage of all the Black Friday and Christmas Holiday sales and discounts). It screams. That said, my 5 year old $500 desktop is still good enough.

ruggiex · 07-24-2014, 05:42 PM

Ages ago there used to be some compatibility issues, nowadays it is non-existent. Their performance characteristics are a bit different but in general it's no big deal.

Just a note about what interested_observer said, number of 'cores' aren't meant to be compared between different manufactures for both cpu and graphics card.

JohnBee · 07-24-2014, 05:56 PM

Originally posted by ismaelg

Hi,

I recall reading or hearing somewhere a while ago a discussion about AMD vs Intel powered PCs. Something that AMD powered machines were not 100% compatible with some softwares like Photoshop or Lightroom. That doesn't make much sense to me but I'm not an expert. Is there any truth about this? If it was on the internet, it must be true right?

Seriously, I'm looking at building myself a new machine, as I have done in the past.

Thanks,
Ismael

We run both, can't tell the difference.
There are of course times when I' like to get really picky about what's faster, but this has nothing whatsoever to do with compatibility of native processor performances. IOW. I really don't think it matters much anymore.

**RGlasel** · 07-24-2014, 06:08 PM

Originally posted by interested_observer

1) Get OpenCL compatible,

Apparently the built-in graphics in Intel chips aren't, so you really need to look at getting a discrete graphics card. Intel does seem to have an advantage in power consumption for equivalent processing power these days, but that doesn't need to be the deciding factor for a desktop computer. Graphic cards and system processors do very different types of calculations, so "cores", "speed" and other measuring sticks are not directly comparable, and the manufacturers' marketing departments would like to keep it that way. Still image processing is relatively light work for any of the last few generations of CPU, so it's pretty hard to go wrong.

reeftool · 07-24-2014, 06:21 PM

I've been running AMD's for years now. There aren't any compatibility issues, at least in regards to photography. Some games require certain high end video cards for the best performance. The stuff you read about goes back to the mid 1990's. Despite their competition, both AMD and Intel have licensing agreements in place because they both use some of each others technology.

**boriscleto** · 07-24-2014, 06:40 PM

Originally posted by RGlasel

Apparently the built-in graphics in Intel chips aren't, so you really need to look at getting a discrete graphics card.

OpenCL - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Quote:

Intel SDK for OpenCL Applications 2013[71] (supports Intel Core processors and Intel HD Graphics 4000/2500)

OS X certainly implements OpenCL for Intel HD Graphics because most of Apple's low end macs use Intel HD Graphics...

**interested_observer** · 07-24-2014, 08:37 PM

Originally posted by ruggiex

Ages ago there used to be some compatibility issues, nowadays it is non-existent. Their performance characteristics are a bit different but in general it's no big deal.

Just a note about what interested_observer said, number of 'cores' aren't meant to be compared between different manufactures for both cpu and graphics card.

Thanks for keeping me honest. I really did not want to get into a big technical discussion, because its not really germane. On the graphic card description you can read something to the effect has 512 streamprocessors, has 4096 streaming cores or what ever. These are different than the "cores" in the main processing chip - but the more the better. That said...

The product lines of AMD and NVidia still have significant differences in architecture, the most distinctive difference is this:
NVidia has fewer cores but they are capable of more complex tasks than the AMD cores.

AMD has more cores that can significantly speed up some calculations but are less flexible.

This is the main reason that you can't simply compare "core count" between AMD and NVidia GPUs to estimate their relative performance. Comparison of GPUs from the same manufacturer is a fair performance indicator.

I would say, decide on a group of cards, with some large amount of stream processors and graphics memory, that is affordable - fits the budget - and is OpenCL compatible - and there you go. Beyond that you are getting into the realm of measuring super computer thruput - and that is always open to debate.

Originally posted by RGlasel

Apparently the built-in graphics in Intel chips aren't, so you really need to look at getting a discrete graphics card. Intel does seem to have an advantage in power consumption for equivalent processing power these days, but that doesn't need to be the deciding factor for a desktop computer. Graphic cards and system processors do very different types of calculations, so "cores", "speed" and other measuring sticks are not directly comparable, and the manufacturers' marketing departments would like to keep it that way. Still image processing is relatively light work for any of the last few generations of CPU, so it's pretty hard to go wrong.

The built in graphic engines on the Intel processor chips are good, but not OpenCL compatible, so as Ron has written better that I did, an additional graphics card is in order. The reason you want OpenCL compatible is that the post processing program (i.e., Adobe), writes some additional software that it down loads into your graphics card (this is the OpenCL part), that will use all of those "stream processors" to speed up the modifications you are making to all of those mega pixels in your images. The reason for OpenCL compatibility is so that Adobe can write the graphics utilities once and will run on both Nvidia and ATI cards. These $50 to $5000 graphics cards are essentially the old Cray supercomputers of years gone by. Like everyone has said, a low end OpenCL graphics card is more than good enough. You can go blind finding the "best", which really is not required. Find one that fits the budget and it will be more than adequate.

**ismaelg** · 07-25-2014, 06:05 AM

Thanks all for the replies. A lot of good info here.
I built my current setup about 5 years ago for about $600. I'm running a Core 2 Duo, ASUS P5n MoBo, 4 GB ram, Nvidia GeForce 620 video card and about 6TB scattered in a gazillion external USB drives nightmare. Since I'm running 32bits Windows 7, adding more ram is not going to help. These days I'm finding myself doing more and more video work for customers, a heavy burden for my poor machine.
So I plan to build another one and keep this as a backup.
I'm thinking in the lines of a top tier i5, at least 8 GB ram or more, 2TB sata drive. A friend recommended to take a look at AMD because they are less expensive but I'm not very familiar with them.

Thanks!

Homo_erectus · 07-25-2014, 06:43 AM

The place where AMD really shines these days is in laptops. Their "APU" line of processors, which is a multicore cpu and a graphics chip in one package, offer a really great value with excellent battery life and very good performance. The newer models even have graphics chips that do ok with current games.

ruggiex · 07-25-2014, 07:03 AM

If you are doing video work, definitely go 64 bit and throw 16 or even 32G of RAM in there imo. RAM isn't very expensive these days.

robthebloke · 07-25-2014, 07:27 AM

Originally posted by interested_observer:

The reason you want OpenCL compatible is that the post processing program (i.e., Adobe), writes some additional software that it down loads into your graphics card (this is the OpenCL part), that will use all of those "stream processors" to speed up the modifications you are making to all of those mega pixels in your images. The reason for OpenCL compatibility is so that Adobe can write the graphics utilities once and will run on both Nvidia and ATI cards. These $50 to $5000 graphics cards are essentially the old Cray supercomputers of years gone by. Like everyone has said, a low end OpenCL graphics card is more than good enough. You can go blind finding the "best", which really is not required. Find one that fits the budget and it will be more than adequate.

Nvidia, amd, and intel all provide opencl contexts [i know this because I'm a graphics programmer by trade, and have been working with opencl quite a lot!]

Nvidia and intel support opencl 1.1. Amd support 1.2 (and have some support for opencl 2.0 in their beta drivers - they also support cl2 on intel CPUs).

Opencl contexts can be shared across CPU and gpu (unless you get an nvidia graphics card - which will actually prevent you from initialising the CPU in a CL context).

In theory opencl is just a simple way of targeting hardware without dropping down to avx/sse CPU instructions (although in practice, you end up writing multiple cl code paths for numerous devices depending on their capabilities - eg optimal vector widths differ between manufacturers and gpu models, not to mention differing CL versions).

Calling a GPU a modern day cray is a bit of an insult to ICL really. Cray never developed anything as parallel as the matrix DAP processor from ICL!

Whether or not you want the fastest or cheapest gpu, will depend on whether you want to partition the device or not. Cheap gpus tend to come with 2 compute units (with say 128 stream cores each), which means you can run 2 seperate jobs in parallel. Better gpus will come with many more.

Realistically though, one of the biggest bottlenecks these days is memory bandwidth (which is true for CPU and gpu). The faster the memory (on both), the better. (so get the fastest ram you can afford)

The AMD A10's aren't bad at all. A10 6700T if you want something energy efficient. A10 7850k for the best performance. If you intend to use a pci-e gpu in addition, you'd be better off with intel.

Mind you, if you are a Lightroom user, talk about opencl is entirely moot - LR does not use the gpu at all. The latest versions of photoshop use CL, and games, but not much else.

delegopa · 08-09-2014, 05:50 AM

Originally posted by ruggiex

If you are doing video work, definitely go 64 bit and throw 16 or even 32G of RAM in there imo. RAM isn't very expensive these days.

Yes, video processing is where 64 bit and lots of ram can really shine. Throw in a fast cpu with lots of cores to make good use of it. With the right software your graphic card can accelerate the processing too. The problem is to balance all these bottlenecks at a certain price point

07-24-2014, 03:13 PM	#1
ismaelg Loyal Site Supporter Join Date: Apr 2009 Location: Puerto Rico Photos: Gallery Posts: 2,684	Intel vs AMD? Hi, I recall reading or hearing somewhere a while ago a discussion about AMD vs Intel powered PCs. Something that AMD powered machines were not 100% compatible with some softwares like Photoshop or Lightroom. That doesn't make much sense to me but I'm not an expert. Is there any truth about this? If it was on the internet, it must be true right? Seriously, I'm looking at building myself a new machine, as I have done in the past. Thanks, Ismael

07-24-2014, 05:02 PM	#4
interested_observer Loyal Site Supporter Join Date: Jun 2009 Location: Tumbleweed, Arizona Photos: Gallery \| Albums Posts: 5,707	Generally speaking Intel vs AMD - they are both comparable. I have boxes from both companies in my lab for evaluation - and there are differences that probably only my staff and I can see (or care about for that matter) for the specific work we do. CPU cores - the more the better. Get at least 4 cores. Memory - They recommend 8GB - if you can afford it go 16GB. Generally memory is cheap. Graphic Cards - 1) Get OpenCL compatible, 2) more cores the better, 3) more graphics memory the better Storage - Yes SSD is the fastest, however spinning media (disks) are still the cheapest (and fast enough). Get at least 1TB, and look for the rotational speed. The faster the disk spins, the quicker you can get to your data. eSATA interfaces have a high transfer rate (near PCIe bus rates). All in all, you can go into a large box store (Best Buy, Costco, etc.) and find pretty much what you are looking for at a $500 price point. You might not get the absolute optimum setup, but it should be close enough for the price. One note - Most of these boxes use the on chip graphics processor. You can drop in a graphics card (OpenCL), however the OEM power supply in the box will limit your selection. The graphics cards will be the lower tier that will fit within the OEM power supply spec. They are good enough for $50. I have done this 3 times now with boxes from Costco over the years. About 18 months ago, my son built a nearly no holds barred system for about $900 (took advantage of all the Black Friday and Christmas Holiday sales and discounts). It screams. That said, my 5 year old $500 desktop is still good enough.

07-24-2014, 08:37 PM	#10
interested_observer Loyal Site Supporter Join Date: Jun 2009 Location: Tumbleweed, Arizona Photos: Gallery \| Albums Posts: 5,707	Originally posted by ruggiex Ages ago there used to be some compatibility issues, nowadays it is non-existent. Their performance characteristics are a bit different but in general it's no big deal. Just a note about what interested_observer said, number of 'cores' aren't meant to be compared between different manufactures for both cpu and graphics card. Thanks for keeping me honest. I really did not want to get into a big technical discussion, because its not really germane. On the graphic card description you can read something to the effect has 512 streamprocessors, has 4096 streaming cores or what ever. These are different than the "cores" in the main processing chip - but the more the better. That said... The product lines of AMD and NVidia still have significant differences in architecture, the most distinctive difference is this: NVidia has fewer cores but they are capable of more complex tasks than the AMD cores. AMD has more cores that can significantly speed up some calculations but are less flexible. This is the main reason that you can't simply compare "core count" between AMD and NVidia GPUs to estimate their relative performance. Comparison of GPUs from the same manufacturer is a fair performance indicator. I would say, decide on a group of cards, with some large amount of stream processors and graphics memory, that is affordable - fits the budget - and is OpenCL compatible - and there you go. Beyond that you are getting into the realm of measuring super computer thruput - and that is always open to debate. Originally posted by RGlasel Apparently the built-in graphics in Intel chips aren't, so you really need to look at getting a discrete graphics card. Intel does seem to have an advantage in power consumption for equivalent processing power these days, but that doesn't need to be the deciding factor for a desktop computer. Graphic cards and system processors do very different types of calculations, so "cores", "speed" and other measuring sticks are not directly comparable, and the manufacturers' marketing departments would like to keep it that way. Still image processing is relatively light work for any of the last few generations of CPU, so it's pretty hard to go wrong. The built in graphic engines on the Intel processor chips are good, but not OpenCL compatible, so as Ron has written better that I did, an additional graphics card is in order. The reason you want OpenCL compatible is that the post processing program (i.e., Adobe), writes some additional software that it down loads into your graphics card (this is the OpenCL part), that will use all of those "stream processors" to speed up the modifications you are making to all of those mega pixels in your images. The reason for OpenCL compatibility is so that Adobe can write the graphics utilities once and will run on both Nvidia and ATI cards. These $50 to $5000 graphics cards are essentially the old Cray supercomputers of years gone by. Like everyone has said, a low end OpenCL graphics card is more than good enough. You can go blind finding the "best", which really is not required. Find one that fits the budget and it will be more than adequate.

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07-24-2014, 03:54 PM	#2
boriscleto Loyal Site Supporter Join Date: Dec 2009 Location: North Syracuse, NY Photos: Gallery Posts: 16,477	AMD had a press release just last month about Photoshop CC getting AMD Acceleration. Both APUs and GPUs. AMD Acceleration Enhances the Creative Workflows for the Next Wave of Adobe Photoshop CC Features

07-24-2014, 03:59 PM	#3
MarkJerling Moderator Site Supporter Join Date: May 2012 Location: Wairarapa, New Zealand Photos: Gallery \| Albums Posts: 20,422	Latest system requirements for Photoshop here: https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/system-requirements.html You don't need a high spec graphics card such as you'd use for 3D CAD work or for serious gaming. I use Intel Core i7 and a NVIDEA 4000M graphics card. No problems here.

07-24-2014, 05:42 PM	#5
ruggiex Veteran Member Join Date: Feb 2010 Location: East Bay Area Photos: Gallery Posts: 811	Ages ago there used to be some compatibility issues, nowadays it is non-existent. Their performance characteristics are a bit different but in general it's no big deal. Just a note about what interested_observer said, number of 'cores' aren't meant to be compared between different manufactures for both cpu and graphics card.

07-24-2014, 05:56 PM	#6
JohnBee Veteran Member Join Date: Sep 2008 Location: Newrfoundland Photos: Albums Posts: 4,667	Originally posted by ismaelg Hi, I recall reading or hearing somewhere a while ago a discussion about AMD vs Intel powered PCs. Something that AMD powered machines were not 100% compatible with some softwares like Photoshop or Lightroom. That doesn't make much sense to me but I'm not an expert. Is there any truth about this? If it was on the internet, it must be true right? Seriously, I'm looking at building myself a new machine, as I have done in the past. Thanks, Ismael We run both, can't tell the difference. There are of course times when I' like to get really picky about what's faster, but this has nothing whatsoever to do with compatibility of native processor performances. IOW. I really don't think it matters much anymore.

07-24-2014, 06:08 PM	#7
RGlasel Site Supporter Join Date: Sep 2013 Location: Saskatoon Photos: Gallery \| Albums Posts: 3,229	Originally posted by interested_observer 1) Get OpenCL compatible, Apparently the built-in graphics in Intel chips aren't, so you really need to look at getting a discrete graphics card. Intel does seem to have an advantage in power consumption for equivalent processing power these days, but that doesn't need to be the deciding factor for a desktop computer. Graphic cards and system processors do very different types of calculations, so "cores", "speed" and other measuring sticks are not directly comparable, and the manufacturers' marketing departments would like to keep it that way. Still image processing is relatively light work for any of the last few generations of CPU, so it's pretty hard to go wrong.

07-24-2014, 06:21 PM	#8
reeftool Pentaxian Join Date: Dec 2007 Location: Upstate New York Photos: Gallery \| Albums Posts: 9,555	I've been running AMD's for years now. There aren't any compatibility issues, at least in regards to photography. Some games require certain high end video cards for the best performance. The stuff you read about goes back to the mid 1990's. Despite their competition, both AMD and Intel have licensing agreements in place because they both use some of each others technology.

07-24-2014, 06:40 PM	#9
boriscleto Loyal Site Supporter Join Date: Dec 2009 Location: North Syracuse, NY Photos: Gallery Posts: 16,477	Originally posted by RGlasel Apparently the built-in graphics in Intel chips aren't, so you really need to look at getting a discrete graphics card. OpenCL - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Quote: Intel SDK for OpenCL Applications 2013[71] (supports Intel Core processors and Intel HD Graphics 4000/2500) OS X certainly implements OpenCL for Intel HD Graphics because most of Apple's low end macs use Intel HD Graphics...

07-25-2014, 06:05 AM	#11
ismaelg Loyal Site Supporter Join Date: Apr 2009 Location: Puerto Rico Photos: Gallery Posts: 2,684 Original Poster	Thanks all for the replies. A lot of good info here. I built my current setup about 5 years ago for about $600. I'm running a Core 2 Duo, ASUS P5n MoBo, 4 GB ram, Nvidia GeForce 620 video card and about 6TB scattered in a gazillion external USB drives nightmare. Since I'm running 32bits Windows 7, adding more ram is not going to help. These days I'm finding myself doing more and more video work for customers, a heavy burden for my poor machine. So I plan to build another one and keep this as a backup. I'm thinking in the lines of a top tier i5, at least 8 GB ram or more, 2TB sata drive. A friend recommended to take a look at AMD because they are less expensive but I'm not very familiar with them. Thanks!

07-25-2014, 06:43 AM	#12
Homo_erectus Veteran Member Join Date: Sep 2012 Posts: 410	The place where AMD really shines these days is in laptops. Their "APU" line of processors, which is a multicore cpu and a graphics chip in one package, offer a really great value with excellent battery life and very good performance. The newer models even have graphics chips that do ok with current games.

07-25-2014, 07:03 AM	#13
ruggiex Veteran Member Join Date: Feb 2010 Location: East Bay Area Photos: Gallery Posts: 811	If you are doing video work, definitely go 64 bit and throw 16 or even 32G of RAM in there imo. RAM isn't very expensive these days.

07-25-2014, 07:27 AM	#14
robthebloke Veteran Member Join Date: Sep 2013 Location: Sydney Photos: Albums Posts: 844	Originally posted by interested_observer: The reason you want OpenCL compatible is that the post processing program (i.e., Adobe), writes some additional software that it down loads into your graphics card (this is the OpenCL part), that will use all of those "stream processors" to speed up the modifications you are making to all of those mega pixels in your images. The reason for OpenCL compatibility is so that Adobe can write the graphics utilities once and will run on both Nvidia and ATI cards. These $50 to $5000 graphics cards are essentially the old Cray supercomputers of years gone by. Like everyone has said, a low end OpenCL graphics card is more than good enough. You can go blind finding the "best", which really is not required. Find one that fits the budget and it will be more than adequate. Nvidia, amd, and intel all provide opencl contexts [i know this because I'm a graphics programmer by trade, and have been working with opencl quite a lot!] Nvidia and intel support opencl 1.1. Amd support 1.2 (and have some support for opencl 2.0 in their beta drivers - they also support cl2 on intel CPUs). Opencl contexts can be shared across CPU and gpu (unless you get an nvidia graphics card - which will actually prevent you from initialising the CPU in a CL context). In theory opencl is just a simple way of targeting hardware without dropping down to avx/sse CPU instructions (although in practice, you end up writing multiple cl code paths for numerous devices depending on their capabilities - eg optimal vector widths differ between manufacturers and gpu models, not to mention differing CL versions). Calling a GPU a modern day cray is a bit of an insult to ICL really. Cray never developed anything as parallel as the matrix DAP processor from ICL! Whether or not you want the fastest or cheapest gpu, will depend on whether you want to partition the device or not. Cheap gpus tend to come with 2 compute units (with say 128 stream cores each), which means you can run 2 seperate jobs in parallel. Better gpus will come with many more. Realistically though, one of the biggest bottlenecks these days is memory bandwidth (which is true for CPU and gpu). The faster the memory (on both), the better. (so get the fastest ram you can afford) The AMD A10's aren't bad at all. A10 6700T if you want something energy efficient. A10 7850k for the best performance. If you intend to use a pci-e gpu in addition, you'd be better off with intel. Mind you, if you are a Lightroom user, talk about opencl is entirely moot - LR does not use the gpu at all. The latest versions of photoshop use CL, and games, but not much else.

08-09-2014, 05:50 AM	#15
delegopa Senior Member Join Date: Apr 2013 Posts: 244	Originally posted by ruggiex If you are doing video work, definitely go 64 bit and throw 16 or even 32G of RAM in there imo. RAM isn't very expensive these days. Yes, video processing is where 64 bit and lots of ram can really shine. Throw in a fast cpu with lots of cores to make good use of it. With the right software your graphic card can accelerate the processing too. The problem is to balance all these bottlenecks at a certain price point