Digit Zero1 Awards and Digit Best Buy Awards 2022: Best Desktop Processors

The desktop processor segment saw quite the upheaval last year with the launch of Intel’s 12th Gen Alder Lake processors featuring their new heterogeneous microarchitecture. AMD continues to experiment with newer packaging technologies such as wafer-stacking resulting in the Ryzen 7 5800X3D that beats a lot of the mainstream processors in gaming workloads thanks to a massive cache that’s placed really close to the cores. 

Intel came out with their 13th Gen Raptor Lake processors featuring several tweaks and improvements that resulted in a surprisingly high gain in performance over their previous gen processors and AMD also overhauled a significant chunk of their silicon design to get even more performance. All of this performance gain comes at the cost of higher power consumption and we saw the processors guzzling power like there was no tomorrow. 

This is yet another year when workloads continued to be dominated by single-threaded performance and AMD seems to have worked a lot in this space to inch closer to Intel’s single-threaded performance lead. What it came down to was how the heterogeneous architecture of Intel fared against the homogenous architecture that AMD continues to have.

Digit Zero1 Award 2022 Winner: AMD Ryzen 9 7950X

Price: ₹57,955

Suffice to say, lots of cores in a homogenous architecture won AMD the performance crown this year. AMD always had the lead in core counts but the single-threaded performance of said cores were always lagging behind Intel. So AMD always had the lead in multi-threaded performance but in gaming and other workloads that are driven by single-threaded performance, Intel was always ahead. The architectural improvements with Zen 4 have resulted in the Ryzen processors gaining a lot in terms of single-threaded performance and coupled with the massive core count of the flagship Ryzen 7000 processor, the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X managed to bag the Zero1 Award this year. We suspect that if the Intel 13900K had a few more performance cores instead of efficiency cores, then the tables would have easily turned and Intel would have been this year’s winner. AMD also included on-chip graphics capabilities across the entire stack of processors which are decently powerful as well. Not that anyone with a flagship processor is going to be using the IGP for gaming but it’s still good to have a decently capable IGP. Lastly, on the pricing aspect, AMD and Intel flagships can be easily found for about 57-59K each, which gives neither processor any advantage in the Zero1 Awards but for the consumer, the Ryzen 9 7950X comes out the winner.

1st Runner Up: Intel Core i9-13900K

Price: ₹58,350

Intel really outdid itself with the Raptor Lake launch. Doubling the E-Cores appears to have given the 13th Gen processors a significant boost in performance which is quite unexpected. The performance gains were indicative of what are usually seen with completely new architectures. However, with the launch of the Ryzen 7000 processors, Intel lost a decent chunk of the single-threaded performance lead that it had enjoyed for most of this decade. And a lot of the applications continue to be driven by single-threaded performance to this day. So performance gain in that aspect can really swing the scores when it comes to processors. Sure, throwing in a lot of cores allows you to gain more multi-threaded performance but you can only add so much to a desktop processor.

Digit Best Buy Award 2022 Winner: Intel Core i5-13600K

Price: ₹31,600

This was an extremely close battle between two competitively priced SKUs with a minor gap in performance but the cost aspects were worlds apart. The AMD Ryzen 5 7600X is a great processor on several fronts – power consumption, multi-threaded performance and single-threaded performance. However, the Intel Core i5-13600K is no different. Intel continues to lead in the single-threaded performance benchmarks and with the same amount of performance cores between the 7600X and the 13600K, the decision was about which of the two became the better buy. Simply looking at the processors, the AMD Ryzen 5 7600X retails for about 5K cheaper than the Intel 13600K. However, the 13600K’s lead in single-threaded performance by about 5-8 per cent meant that Intel retained a lead in gaming performance and day-to-day productivity/office workloads. A difference of 5000 rupees can make a huge difference when calculating the value proposition of processors, however, there was another key change this year. AMD shifted to the AM5 socket with the advent of the Ryzen 7000 family and that resulted in a significant bump in cost of ownership. The cheapest board capable of driving the 13600K comes at around INR 7,200 whereas the cheapest AM5 motherboard starts off at INR 17,750. The price difference between the two competing processors is easily outweighed by the price difference of getting a new motherboard and that simple fact tilted the scales in Intel’s favour. 

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Mithun Mohandas

Mithun Mohandas is an Indian technology journalist with 10 years of experience covering consumer technology. He is currently employed at Digit in the capacity of a Managing Editor. Mithun has a background in Computer Engineering and was an active member of the IEEE during his college days. He has a penchant for digging deep into unravelling what makes a device tick. If there's a transistor in it, Mithun's probably going to rip it apart till he finds it. At Digit, he covers processors, graphics cards, storage media, displays and networking devices aside from anything developer related. As an avid PC gamer, he prefers RTS and FPS titles, and can be quite competitive in a race to the finish line. He only gets consoles for the exclusives. He can be seen playing Valorant, World of Tanks, HITMAN and the occasional Age of Empires or being the voice behind hundreds of Digit videos. View Full Profile