Intel vs. AMD for Pro Tools

[mjslakeridge]

Hi ya'll, I have been reading these forums for a while but am a new poster. There have been a few discussions about how Intel Processors are superior to AMD for PT. Some have made general statements to the effect that certain Intel chips are designed specifically for video or audio processing, or "why do you think Apple uses Intel chips?" I am not an expert in chip design or computers in general, but would it be wrong to assume that the processor is doing what it was made to do, performing calculations? It doesn't know if the user is editing video, recording audio or working on an excel spreadsheet. I started out with a dual core Intel Pentium D in the original machine I bought from Sweetwater way back when. In the past 6 months I have replaced the motherboard and currently have an AMD FX-6300 (six core) processor. I know you can't compare the 2 processors. I am running PT 7.4 on windows xp home. Yesterday I created a stress test session-32 audio tracks, 4 minutes long, with 5 inserts on EACH channel. (4 band eq, 7 band eq, Smack compressor, TL Space convolution reverb and Amplitude). This is way more than I would typically use. 5 cores assigned to RTAS processing. Put it in loop play and let it roll-no problems. Task manager shows cpu utilization of 46-49%.

I just wanted to see if anyone on this forum has any specific technical knowledge as to why Intel chips seem to be preferred over AMD. I am helping someone spec out a PT 10 machine running on Windows 7 (or 8), and he wants to use the AMD FX-6300 processor, with a better Mobo that the cheap (free) one I got from Microcenter. Looking forward to a good discussion.