There are two big players in the PC chips business: Intel and AMD. Both brands inevitably have their fans and detractors, but the reality is both companies are remarkable designers of exceptionally complex mini-machines. So why do we only build machines with AMD Ryzen chips? And is this likely to change? Read on below.

How Intel Lost Its Mojo

For years it was accepted fact that Intel made superior chips, with AMD playing the part of the plucky underdog who, despite much goodwill, couldn't really compete with the might of the world's biggest chipmaker. This was especially evident in the music and audio world, where CPU power is so important.

Things started to change, though, when AMD released its first Ryzen chips in 2017. Suddenly both companies were outdoing each other on benchmarks, their positions reversing roughly every six months.

When I first launched this business in 2021, I selected AMD's Ryzen 5000 series chips as the basis for all my builds. This was partly for simplicity (I had one myself and knew how to build these machines) but mostly because AMD had pulled a blinder and comprehensively thrashed Intel's 10th generation Core chips with some impressive technological innovations which allowed their CPUs to run significantly cooler and therefore significantly faster.

Meanwhile Intel was facing years of delays with a new manufacturing process they just couldn't get right. The size of the transistors in CPUs is measured in nanometers (they really are VERY small, which is why we can have billions of them on a CPU only slightly bigger than a postage stamp) and whereas AMD was now working at the scale of 7nm transistors, Intel was being forced to extend their 14nm process over more generations than intended.

A Hybrid Solution

In order to remain competitive, Intel decided to exploit the fact that computers very rarely needs to hammer every core on a CPU at the same time. In modern processor design, power is allocated to different cores as needed, allowing them to speed up when they are dealing with a high load and slow down when they aren't. Intel's solution to cooling their chips down was to hobble some of the cores permanently in a so-called hybrid CPU design.

In Intel's parlance, a hybrid CPU is divided into Performance cores (or P-cores, AKA regular cores) and Efficiency cores (E-cores), significantly down-clocked, reduced-power cores that are useful for handling low-level background tasks, freeing the Performance cores up for more computationally intensive workloads. This type of design had been a big success for Apple, whose first-ever CPU, the hybrid Silicon M1, had just raised the bar for chip manufacturers everywhere.

For Intel, the approach worked—at least on paper. Their new 12th generation "Alder Lake" chips were top of the benchmarks again, particularly in the all-important single-core league tables, which caused many in the music and audio community to sit up and take notice again. AMD launched its 7000 series (with a change of socket and a slightly belated move to DDR5 RAM), to which Intel responded with its 13th generation, once again taking the crown.

Why Intel Just Isn't Great for Audio Anymore

But it wasn't long until DAW forums started filling up with disgruntled recent purchasers of Intel's new chips. Steinberg went so far as to issue a statement warning users to avoid using them with Cubase / Nuendo. The problem was frequent audio dropouts, the bane of every composer or producer's life. And the reason for those audio dropouts was that hybrid core design.

As explained in my article on how CPUs work, realtime audio processes—the number-crunching needed to allow you to press a few keys on your MIDI keyboard and have your computer respond with the sound of an orchestra quickly enough that you don't notice any latency—is incredibly intensive. And because plugin chains are usually processed in sequence on a single core, they are highly susceptible to dropouts whenever one core gets overloaded.

In theory, this shouldn't be a problem for Intel, even though their E-cores are significantly less capable than their P-cores. They use something called a Thread Director that is supposed to ensure these intensive, high-priority audio tasks end up on the P-cores, while only low-level background tasks are fed to the E-cores. The problem is that audio is very, very complex and there are several different systems that decide how threads should be handled.

First, a plugin launches a process which is passed to your DAW. Your DAW requests CPU time from Windows, which then prioritises the process against all the other (millions of) processes running simultaneously. Intel's Thread Director offers Windows some hints about which core to send that process to, and then that core attempts to process it quickly enough that it doesn't cause any hiccups. Wash, rinse and repeat a billion times a second.

The problem with having all these competing schedulers—in the DAW, in the operating system and on the chip itself—is that processes are sometimes miscategorised as background tasks. That means they get sent to the E-cores. How or why this happens is beyond the scope of this article but suffice to say, if it does happen, it's like you're trying to run some critical element of your DAW session on a mobile phone chip, instead of the high-performance, benchmark-topping desktop CPU you actually paid for.

So What Makes AMD Better?

Steinberg claims that this problem has been largely resolved with the latest updates to Windows 11 and the newer editions of Cubase and Nuendo, but forums continue to fill up with horror stories about expensive new Intel CPUs delivering less-than-adequate results. The reality is that neither they nor any other DAW maker can entirely control how tasks are scheduled on a CPU. Every third-party plugin designer and every audio driver maker would also need to optimise their software to ensure all processes are directed to the P-cores.

Various workarounds have been suggested. Disabling E-cores in the BIOS is one option, but this reduces multi-core performance and power efficiency across the board. A better approach is to set your DAW's "core affinity" so that Windows only lets the programme run on the P-cores. The latter is clearly the better solution but it's quite technical and may need to be setup again every time you update your DAW.

So why choose AMD? Well, quite simply because none of these issues apply to their chips. Using advanced technology from TSMC (who also make Apple's chips), AMD has been able to ensure all their cores use less power than Intel's P-cores while delivering similar performance, meaning every core on an AMD chip can be considered a P-core. That means no matter which core a process ends up on it will have the same amount of processor headroom to play around with.

They have also experienced far fewer reliability issues in the past few years, a big bonus for those of us who offer a three-year warranty on our builds!

Do AMD Chips Have Any Downsides?

Of course, nothing is perfect. The first downside is that Intel tends to have better memory controllers on their chips, meaning they are often able to run RAM at faster speeds. The situation improved with the release of AMD's Ryzen 9000 series in 2024, but Intel still have the edge in terms of RAM speed, especially when it comes to running four sticks of RAM instead of two. However, the degree to which this matters is debatable: in my experience RAM speed is very rarely a bottleneck when it comes to realtime audio, and I don't think Intel's superiority on this score is enough to offset the hybrid core issues discussed above.

As mentioned, Intel does also frequently top single core benchmarks, and I have been banging on about the necessity of strong single core performance to anyone who will listen for years now. But again, I would argue that even if some of your cores run faster than the competition's, that's not very useful when a critical thread can be sent to a core that runs significantly slower.

One other slight issue is that Intel owns the rights to the Thunderbolt™ interface, and they have been very reluctant to hand Thunderbolt™ certification to AMD motherboards in the past. However, almost all of the motherboards we have selected for our builds have workarounds for this, either using Thunderbolt™-compatible USB4 ports or Thunderbolt™ PCIe cards, meaning most of you shouldn't have problems running your Thunderbolt™ components on our machines.

There's also the long-running debate about whether AMD CPUs are compatible with Pro Tools. I've prepared a separate FAQ about that one, as it comes up a lot. The TL;DR version of it is: in my experience, Pro Tools runs just fine on AMD processors, and this is to be expected as AMD and Intel CPUs look exactly the same as far as the software is concerned. You shouldn't worry about it, but if you are concerned, have a read of the FAQ.

Will the Situation Change?

It may do. I have nothing against Intel processors and I have no ideological reason for not building audio machines with them. AMD has already experimented with hybrid architectures of their own in mobile chips, and if they introduce that to their desktop processors it may change the calculus significantly. For the moment, though, it doesn't look like they have plans to do this in their mainstream consumer lines.

Or it may be that Microsoft and Intel and the various DAW makers eventually figure out a way to reliably ensure these critical realtime audio threads are directed to the correct place. If and when that happens, I will happily expand my range to include Intel offerings.

But for now, I strongly believe you are better off with an AMD processor.