> when paired with a 4090, the intel CPUs take the lead

Crypto mining is out, but enterprising gamers can now defray their costs by operating a steam turbine with waste heat.

Or making an impromptu campfire!

> They win absolute performance on Desktop CPUs but lose on perf-per-watt.

How is that possible? They have better thermal design or something?

Intel allows the CPUs to draw significantly more power than AMD does.

These are about the most reliable benchmarks you can find on the internet:

https://youtu.be/todoXi1Y-PI?t=342

What's preventing AMD from allowing the same?

Heat distribution as far as I can tell, this video from derbauer shows that shifting the way the cooler contacts the CPU lid (aka offset mounting) can provide drastically lower temperatures which means the cpu is allowed to draw more juice. In the video [1], there's an 8% improvement which tbh is massive; though it seems that the creator missed that, so ignore the conclusion, look at the numbers. An 8% improvement would have put AMD in the lead with intel unable to compete.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mPi6DjGZpQ

no, they just require bigger coolers.

right, pair your $400 CPU with a $1400 video card, and man, look how fast it is for graphics applications!

Here is the catch; when Intel and AMD presented their slides, nobody could disclose information about the Lovelace performance, and therefore all comparisons were made using a 3090ti, and in that scenario, even in Intel's own graphs, the 5800x3d was actually performing very well; so much so that they were playing coy with its performance;

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/intel-announce-13th-gen-rap...

AMD has a huge gaping pricing hole between AM4 and anything AM5, which makes Intel 13th gen rather more attractive. And the 5800X3D is actually faster than the AM5 parts in some titles iirc