My first CPU at age ~8 was a Pentium Pro, followed by a Pentium II. That was the last Intel CPU I ever owned. I stuck on an FX8350 for a while, and it was never the bottleneck for gaming performane compared to the GPU.

For a non-enthusiast, AMD has been a great choice almost for my whole life.

I've gone back and forth over the last 3 decades. My dad has been an employee at Intel since 1995, so I started with the original Pentium and basically upgraded my CPU every year from the 90s to the mid 2000s. I don't engage in fanboyism, I just like to have the best bang for my buck. So I've had a few opportunities to try AMD CPUs - mainly the Athlon series (Thunderbird, XP, and 64 series). My biggest issue with the AMD CPUs was always heat management; those chips got HOT. In laptops they were almost unusable after a few months because they would get so hot, components would start to melt. My first AMD laptop I had to send back after 3 months due to the heat issue. It cost me $99 to get it repaired and a 6-week wait time. That left a bitter taste in my mouth and put me off of AMD. Do you know if the heat issues are still prominent? I wouldn't mind giving AMD another chance

At various times in their history where AMD was behind in core design, manufacturing, or both, they cranked power (and thus heat) up to fairly obscene levels to attempt to compete with Intel. That's not the case now with Zen and TSMC 7nm - you cant really compare an AMD CPU now to one even 5 years old, much less 20 years old.

For laptops this generation (Intel Ice Lake vs AMD Renoir), there are now several reviews of the "same" laptop chassis with both versions:

Lenovo IdeaPad S540-13: https://next.lab501.ro/notebook/english-lenovo-ideapad-s540-...

Lenovo ThinkPad 14s: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-ThinkPad-T14s-Review-Bu...

XMG Gaming Laptop comparison: https://www.techspot.com/review/2075-same-laptop-different-c...

TLDR: AMD significantly outperforms Intel in absolute performance and performance per watt; battery life is about equal - depends on implementation and how its measured (Intel is still a little better on idle, video playback, but much worse under load), temps usually limited by laptop's thermal solution, but under high TDP, favors AMD.

The Tiger Lake U chips should be pretty competitive with Renoir at 15W, especially as there are almost no AMD options paired with 16:10 or HiDPI displays - we'll have to see when they come out. Tiger Lake H isn't expected until Q1 2021 and will have to compete with Cezanne (Zen 3 core, which is expected to have some pretty big IPC gains).

Awesome, that's very useful info. Thanks for taking the time to link these and elaborate on the data

I actually like the P2 and working with smp clerons. But the AMD dx was a nice chip too