- Intel’s cheaper CPUs are now challenging AMD’s high price logic
- Performance gap narrows as AMD charges more for modest desktop gains
- Power efficiency and cost pressures are reshaping the high CPU value
I’ve already written about Intel quietly taking control of the low end of the desktop CPU market, where chips priced around $200 now offer performance that used to sit much higher up the stack.
But making things even more uncomfortable for AMD is the fact that a similar pattern is creeping into the high end, where Team Red’s pricing no longer stretches as far as it once did.
A comparison between AMD’s Ryzen 9 7950X and Intel’s Core Ultra 7 265KF shows why. On paper, the Ryzen part looks comfortably dominant with 16 cores and 32 threads, while Intel’s chip tops out at 20 threads using a mix of performance and efficiency cores. Benchmark results, however, tell a less dramatic – and far more interesting – story.
AMD ahead… marginally
The Ryzen 9 7950X scores around 62,260 in PassMark’s CPU Mark, while the Core Ultra 7 265KF lands at around 58,734. That puts AMD ahead, but not by much, especially given the hardware and price differences.
Single-thread performance narrows the gap much further. Intel’s processor scores around 4,926, slightly ahead of the Ryzen 9 7950X at around 4,876, which means something for daily desktop workloads that don’t scale cleanly across dozens of threads.
Pricing makes the situation more difficult to defend. The Core Ultra 7 265KF retails for around $270 on Amazon, while the Ryzen 9 7950X can be found selling for a much more expensive $501 over on B&H.
Paying nearly twice as much for a single-digit percentage lead in aggregate benchmarks shifts the value argument away from core counts and toward efficiency.
Power draw adds to this imbalance. AMD’s chip is rated at 170W compared to Intel’s 125W, and estimated annual energy costs reflect this difference of about $31 for the Ryzen processor versus about $23 for Intel’s chip.
The Ryzen 9 7950X still has a place in heavily threaded workloads like rendering, simulation, and large-scale code compilation, where its extra threads stay busy. Outside of these scenarios, that advantage drops quickly.
In my previous look at the sub-$200 segment, I said that Intel was starting to look like old AMD by offering more performance for less money.
At the high end, the roles are not reversed completebut the pressure feels familiar, as Intel delivers close enough performance to make AMD’s premium prices awkwardly difficult to justify.
Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews and opinions in your feeds. Be sure to click the Follow button!
And of course you can too follow TechRadar on TikTok for news, reviews, video unboxings, and get regular updates from us on WhatsApp also.
