AMD and Intel making budget gaming better.

Both AMD and Intel are locked in a battle to win over the hearts and wallets of PC gamers with their release of the AMD Ryzen 3100 and 3300X and the Core i3 10320, i3 10300 and i3 10100 from Intel.

Ryzen Fueled Competition

The release of Ryzen in 2017 came as a surprise to not only Intel but also to consumers who didn't expect the great value that AMD's new offerings at the time would kick start. Ryzen processors provided much-needed competition in the Desktop CPU market as for many years Intel had been reigning as king in that segment.

Intel at the time had gotten too comfortable in its position and this was shown by the persistence of dual-core i3 and four-core i5 with hyper-threading often reserved for the upper echelon of gaming and productivity processors. This lack of ambition was confounded by Intel's slow movement to shrink their nanometer size down to 10nm which they only managed to achieve on their mobile possessors aimed at laptops. This lack of innovation is what allowed AMD to muscle in on Intel once-dominant position by pushing the envelope of core counts and thread counts which immediately gave AMD the advantage in heavily thread dependent workloads like streaming and video editing which coincided with an increase in streaming popularity.

It is this increased competition 3 years later that has to lead us to this current situation where we have 4 core CPU with 8 threads being offered by both Intel and AMD at budget prices ranging from $100 to $160. Such appealing and competitive pricing was only a dream years ago and we have AMD to thank for that.

Shift from Single core to Multi-core

Traditionally mainstream creative and gaming applications were locked at using 1 to 2 core in most cases even if there where extra cores and threads available and this continues to be the case even now but that status quo is slowly changing and Ryzen's insistence by flooding the market with high core and thread count CPU's has only accelerated this change.

This is shown to be the case by the higher number of gamers that now have higher core and thread count processors than they had in the past. Streams Hardware survey shows that the number of dual-core and single-core CPU's being used has been steadily declining while multi-core CPU's have been on the rise.

The industries persistence on not utilizing many cores was down to Intel's dominance which presented developers little chance to optimize their programs to work on more than two cores but now with streaming on the rise around the world and the popularity and abundance of multi-core processors things will start to change.

Consoles will also help usher in Multi-core gaming as the large install base that consoles provide means that developers will come to see developing games on 8 core 16 thread processors as the norm and this should come to reflect in gaming across the board.

Now is the best time to build your new Gaming/Productivity PC

There has never been a better time to be a PC builder than it is currently is as there is a bevvy of CPU's are available that not only have the raw processing power needed to perform just about any task but do so cheaply too.

In the past, as it is now a very real barrier to PC's has always been the price of the individual components required to build a decent gaming or productivity machine which was mainly down to Intel's monopoly on the market which led to higher prices due to lack of competition. That is however no longer the case and now the PC ecosystem is more accessible than ever.