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human
LI5: The difference between AMD and Intel Processors

Can someone explain the difference between Intel and AMD processors?  I know about intel's hyper threading and turbo boost.  So can you put more focus on AMD?  Also if you are up to it the differences between Intel, AMD, and Nvidia graphics cards.

Thanks!!
gpt
As for the technological differences, they do differ quite a bit. Intel and AMD design their cores and architectures very differently and the same goes for AMD and NVIDIA.

For example, AMD's new Bulldozer chips are advertised as having 8 cores, but this is not as simple as it used to be in the Pentium D days (no pun intended). Pentium D was in fact just a chip with two dies on it!  Most multi core chips now have their cores on a single die, though. What AMD has done, however, is that they have installed so called Bulldozer modules on their new CPU's. The FX8150 had four of these modules.

These modules have two integer processors (for calculations with whole numbers), but they share the FPU (which is like a huge office that do calculations using numbers with a decimal), so you could say it's a phony 8-core, but you would probably offend quite a few AMD users.

Another difference is the interconnect they use. AMD uses Hyper Transport (HT, not Hyper Threading which is actually HTT) while Intel uses Quick Path Interconnect. They fuction differently but it really doesnt matter much in day-to-day usage.

Then AMD and NVIDIA. An important difference is how they use and design their shader units. AMD AMD puts a whole lot of shaders on their cards. The mid-range cards from the previous series, like the 5850, had about 1400 unified shaders.

NVIDIA, on the other hand, uses slightly different CUDA cores, of which a graphics chip might have 400. They are a lot faster individually, but they are not much faster or slower than what AMD offers with their huge amounts of shaders.

In the end, it doesn't really matter all that much. AMD's hordes of shaders are faster at easy tasks, like cryptography and NVIDIA is faster at complex tasks like making a video.