Whether it’s the depth of the out-of-order pipeline or the number and capability of integer and floating point ALUs, Firestorm often at least matches and sometimes dramatically exceeds Intel and AMD’s finest. But it is one obvious measure by which Apples cores are clearly both complex and capable.ĭig deeper and there is further architectural evidence of Firestorm’s processing muscle. Instruction decode width is far from the only or even single most important measure of CPU core capability. For context, both AMD and Intel’s latest and most advanced CPU cores are four-wide machines. But for gaming it's only as good as Intel's five-year-old Skylake architecture (Image credit: AMD)Īnyway, Apple’s latest Firestorm cores have massive eight-wide decode capability. And M1 might change that for the better.ĪMD's Ryzen 5000 rocks. It’s really only through adding extra cores that CPU performance has improved substantially in the last decade. When it comes to gaming, Ryzen 5000 is now broadly on par with Intel’s five-year-old Skylake architecture (opens in new tab). Their per-core and per-clock or instructions-per-clock (IPC) performance has barely budged in years. Despite the huge hype surrounding AMD’s new Ryzen 5000 processors, it’s about time that happened.īecause here’s the thing about PC processors. Because it might very well force Intel and AMD to dramatically up their x86 games.

The short answer is that neither the M1 nor an ARM chip of any hue is going to be powering a gaming PC any time soon.

Best CPU for gaming (opens in new tab): the top chips from Intel and AMDīest graphics card (opens in new tab): your perfect pixel-pusher awaitsīest SSD for gaming (opens in new tab): get into the game ahead of the rest

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