How do you tell if a Cpu is better?

[Felix the Cat]

I was told that the amd fx 6350 is inferior to the i5. I'm really confused, because I used to only judge cpus by clock speed. The amd fx 6350 has 3.9 ghz at 6 cores, making it a way higher clock speed. Can someone please explain how you can tell from the specs if a processor is better?

 

[IRONBATMAN]

Clock speeds aren't everything. There are a lot of other factors as well. But basically, without going all technical, just look at benchmarks. But when you say i5, which one are you referring to ?

 

[USAFRet]

Clock speed is by far not the only indicator.

A chart such as this:
http://www.futuremark.com/hardware/cpu

or this:
http://cpuboss.com/

 

[SchizTech]

It's hard to tell directly from the spec sheet. Benchmarks are a better arbiter of performance. When it comes to clock speed, that is a major factor in determining performance (not a measure of it nor the only determinant of performance). Nowadays, when it comes to Intel vs AMD, what Intel has become great at ever since the issues they had with the Pentium 4 and the change in philosophy since the Core 2 duo/quad is efficiency. Intel is both power efficient and efficient at getting more performance from a given clock speed, and they continue to optimize both with each generation (though the gains aren't huge anymore)

 

[jitpublisher]

In years past, clock speed was the biggest thing, period. But the clock speeds that modern CPUs operate at have in many ways reached their practical limits, you simply cannot go much faster by pure clock speed without causing too much heat and other issues. (to put it very simply) Remember when Cyrix came out with their 6x86 CPUS in the mid 90's? http://www.x86-guide.com/en/cpu/AMD-Athlon-XP-1800+-%28Thoroughbred%29-cpu-no367.html The 1800+ for example ran at 1500mhz, but was sold as a processor that performed on par with a Pentium processor running at 1800mhz. AMD starting do this too. The Athlon X2 5000+ actually runs at 2200 mhz, but AMD contends that it would perform on par with a Pentium running at 5ghz, thus the name of the processor, the 5000+! Intel, believe it or not, was the last company to actually sit down and start redesigning their processors to do more work per clock cycle, so instead of just 1 calculation per clock, now we have 2, 3, 4 or even more calculations going on, multiplied by the numbers of cores, both physical and virtual, you can see how the number of calculations per clock cycle can be huge. This is what irked me about Intel in the 90's and for the next 10 years. Rather than doing what AMD and Cyrix did to refine how their processors worked, they simply rode the "bigger numbers mean more performance lie" for years, and just keep upping the clock speeds and rebranding old Pentium technology. To be fair, it did push the need for smaller and smaller dies, and lower energy consumption. But what they heck, they made a lot of money selling basically old tech with a new shiny big number for a lot of years, until they released the Core technology. Selling CPU's by clock rate pretty much died out then. Now, as others have said, you must check benchmarks, and read reviews to discover what particular processor will best suit your needs. Clock speed is still important, but its not the only thing you must look at. Of course, the software you run must also be written to make use of these advancements designed into the processor as well. If you run a program that is single threaded on a 4 or 6 core CPU, the program can only make use of 1 core, so your shiny new multicore processor won't work any better than a single core processor for that particular program or app. There are other factors as well, but you get the idea.

 

[IRONBATMAN]

^ try writing an article for Tom's Hardware