“AMD is poised to take the desktop CPU market lead from Intel during the second half of 2019”
Wow. I didn’t know that. That is really astonishing. Are their CPUs totally compatible with Intel CPUs, both OS and apps?
Yes. Totally compatible.
I’m pretty agnostic about which company to use, I’ll recommend whichever one makes the most sense to customers.
My comment about the second half of this year stands. Intel is behind on getting their 7nm CPUs released and AMD is about to launch them in about a month. That should, at the worst case, put them at nearly identical speed and power consumption with Intel until at least the end of the year. After that who knows. Intel will probably come out swinging with all manner of new SKUs. But right now, they both make some great CPUs so you can choose between them and get a pretty similar experience.
The CURRENT Ryzen 2700x is just a little behind the performance of an Intel i7-8700k or 9700k. If you absolutely must have better performance than that right this second and you don’t want to wait for the new Ryzen CPUs next month then you’d be looking at the Intel i9-9900k. But their price tag is high.
Rumor is the New Ryzen 3000 series will take on the 9900k handily. So if you don’t want the Intel vulnerabilities and that’s your criteria, wait and see what comes out next month from AMD, or wait until next year from Intel.
And market lead might have been a poor choice of words on my part. I doubt AMD will outsell Intel desktop CPUs.
What I meant was, for the first time a blatantly better product in every way with no real compromise.
Intel is so established AMD probably can’t sell more desktop CPUs in the short run even if they actually have a better mouse trap.