As we head into the Black Friday period, theres an abundance of new desktop CPUs from both AMD and Intel to select from. The two big launches for 2022 in the world of CPUs – AMDs Ryzen 7000 series and Intels 13th generation Core – have ended up also being two of the most performance-competitive CPU launches from a that weve ever seen.

First out of the gate in late September was AMD, who launched its eagerly-anticipated Ryzen 7000 series. Based on its new Zen 4 core and built on TSMCs 5 nm node, the flagship Ryzen 9 7950X 16C/32T made big waves at launch. Less than two weeks later, Intel launched its 13th Generation Core parts – codenamed Raptor Lake – bringing to bear higher clockspeeds and doubling the number of efficiency cores per SKU across Intels lineup. Coupled with this, both AMD and Intel have tweaked their pricing strategies versus their previous pandemic-constrained practices; on average AMD CPU prices have ticked up, while Intel CPU prices have ticked down. Meaning the competition calculus has changed at multiple points (and thats before getting into platform costs).