Amd or Intel

[pep75]

Hi S'uppers!

Does anyone know whether an AMD processor is much faster than an Intel when it's used for SketchUp? This because of the fact that SU rely on one core, the processor speed should be as high as possible. Any experience?

[Rich O Brien]

I'd lean towards intel for CPU and nVidia for GPU

Had an AMD setup once and for Adobe apps it was stellar but for 3D stuff it was outperformed by intel and AMD.

Just my personal experience and not based on any empirical tests or benchmarking.

I sure someone with valid facts will provide better feedback than a gut feeling.

[juju]

CPU: Intel outperforms AMD clock-for-clock, so the higher GHz isn't always a true reflection of performance. I generally try to get a CPU with near to or above 3.0 GHz.

GPU: If I remember correctly, a while back SU had issues specific to AMD graphics solutions, nVidia graphics solutions didn't suffer the same trouble, I'm not sure if this has been solved by now.

Also consider if you're going to be doing photo realistic rendering, check if that program supports CUDA or OpenCL( note: not OpenGL), then which is better for that program. If CUDA then go with nVidia, if OpenCL then go with AMD (nVidia also does OpenCL, but not anywhere nearly as well as AMD).

[numerobis]

AMD is dead since a long time when it comes to performance... even the smaller intel mobile processors have a higher single core performance than the fastest AMD CPU...
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html
If you don't overclock, the i7-4790K is clearly the one with the highest single core performance (4,4GHz turbo).
I really hope they will recover in the next years so that there is at least some competition for intel, but i don't see this happen now.

[kaas]

@numerobis said:

AMD is dead since a long time when it comes to performance...
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html

Thanks for the link, very interesting. Also, I'm curious if anyone here overclocks their cpu / gpu and if the extra (20%?) speed really makes a difference.

[numerobis]

I clock all my CPUs since maybe 15 years now. I think the biggest improvement i had was 50% with the i7 920@4GHz. The highest available clockrate at this time was 3,33GHz for ~850€ (i7 975) instead of ~220€ for the 920 if i remember correctly...

If it makes a difference for you today depends on your needs. The difference in single core performance is smaller than for multicore. If you need it only for sketchup, a quadcore would be enough for you and the difference between a 4790K at a stock speed of 4,4GHz (single core turbo) and overclocked to 4,7-4,8GHz (single threaded) is not that big. But if it comes to multithreading and you compare a 5820K hexacore with 3,4GHz all-core turbo and 3,6GHz single-core turbo to a 5820K @4,3-4,5GHz then there is a significant improvement of ~30% (and it is possible that you can reach even higher values for single core overclocking)

And the improvement is even higher if you look at the octocore 5960X, because you're clocking two more cores (even if it can't go as high as the hexacore).

[pep75]

...Thanks for all the replies! I guess I'll stick to my Intel!