Best CPU Architecture?

[Nonscrub]

What is the best CPU architecture? Does it even matter?

 

[bootcher]

There is no best, it depends on different factors such as what you are going to use the computer for and what your budget is.

 

[ComputerSecurityGuy]

Well, after a while- about the late 90's to 2000- x86 won out. Then in the early 2000s, AMD launched AMD64 and that has been the dominant performance architecture for a decade. ARM is gaining a lot of adoption because it has a much better power/performance ratio making it good for mobile devices. So that's basically the state of microarchitectures today, although we still see a lot of MIPS for embedded applications, although ARM is replacing it in most spots, and occasionally a SPARC or Alpha server chip. Even Itanium occasionally shows up. But AMD64 and ARM are the only really important ones.

 

[Nonscrub]

Well I mean like, piledriver, vishera, etc

 

[ComputerSecurityGuy]

Oh, that's what you want. Well, at the moment Skylake leads in performance and Haswell is barely behind it, and Piledriver wins on threaded tasks as a value chip.

 

[TJ Hooker]

Well I mean like, piledriver, vishera, etc

Do you mean microarchitecture (uarch)? Because Vishera isn't a uarch, it's the name for a series of CPUs (based on the Piledriver uarch).

Skylake is the best uarch right now. AMD's most recent uarch is still a fair bit behind of Intel's in terms of performance per clock (and performance per watt I think). However, AMD's CPUs tend to have more cores and higher clocks than Intel's at a given price point to help compensate.