Moorhead's (pictured) purpose for the AMD briefings at IDF is to "educate" (another word for spin I guess!) the reporters/bloggers that inspite of AMD's desktop/mobile slower chips versus Intel's, consumers actually can hope having a better user experience on AMD-based systems than Intel's for an equivalent price, or the same level of experience but for a lot cheaper.

And the main reason is AMD's superior integrated graphics chip that boost the overall PC performance for "GPU/graphics limited" applications like hard-core gaming or DVD playback. However, Intel chips will shine when running CPU-intensive applications like video encoding.

And so AMD's response?

Yes, but we are a lot cheaper! Do you buy that?

By comparing a PC with a Phenom X4 2.6GHz with two 4870s graphics cards in Crossfire mode and another PC with Intel's QX9650 at 3Ghz and also the two same ATI Radeon cards, Moorhead wants to prove that you can have a very similar visual experience with a PC that costs $900 less!

"The only big difference here is the CPU and obviously the motherboard... Basically it's a very consistent experience between the 2 platforms. This is Call Duty 4... A huge difference though. The Intel system is $900 more expensive than the AMD game system primarily driven by the processor cost and the motherboard. So what this says is essentially when it comes to Call of Duty 4 is GPU limited. Particularly when you're running it at the higher resolutions with anti-aliasing turned on, anastropic filtering up really high... It doesn't say that the processor doesn't matter but what it says here is that at $215 processor not a $1,000 processor, you'll get a very similar experience... What could you do with the extra $900? You could buy 20 game titles, a 27" monitor, a cool racing gear with the seat to play an F1 game...".

Now, Moorhead compares two $599 PCs playing a Blu-Ray movie. One with an AMD Phenom triple-core and the other with an Intel dual-core chip, and both with an integrated graphic chip. The Intel system had a much higher CPU utilisation level. And when Moorhead launched an encoding task, the Intel machine peaked at 100% utilisation, affecting the movie playback, where the AMD machine showed a 50% CPU utilisation.

"One thing I want to point to is the low CPU utilisation. [On the AMD desktop it was 10-30% and about 70% on the Intel PC]. One of the reasons why this is important on the desktop because once you get a CPU utilisation above a certain threshold, your fan kicks-in, the systems starts to get a lot hotter and probably more importantly is that you're going need that extra CPU space if your background tasks kicks-in as you are watching a movie. This could be Windows Defender. It could be a virus protection. And in this example, we are kicking-on an iTunes audio encode, from a WAV file to AAC... The AMD system's utilisation is a bit higher and Intel's reached 100%... And you'll see some frames dropping".

AMD Puma vs Centrino Montavina on Blu-Ray playback and Iron Man video game: An "Experiental" Difference!

This time, Moorhead compares head to head two HP notebooks (one with AMD Puma/Turion and the other with Intel Centrino 2/Core 2 Duo). It looks that the Intel-based notebook drops every other frame or so playing the Blu-Ray movie of Pirates of the Caribbean and that it doesn't really reproduce the art on the Iron Man video game.

"One of the challenge with notebooks it that you can't upgrade the graphics and that's why the graphics and the video sub-systems on notebooks are so vital".

2 years after its acquisition, ATI is back on top again with the 4870 X2. AMD's hybrid graphics a notch above Intel's "Switchable Graphics"

Having a superior integrated graphics solution is key for AMD to open the door to the U.S. retail market where over 90% of the notebooks sold in retail use integrated graphics. AMD has its "hybrid graphics" solution that can take advantage in parallel of both an integrated and discrete graphics chips inside of a laptop to boost graphic performance. Something that Intel, even with the latest Centrino 2 platform can't match.

We offer what it's called hybrid graphics. So they're some manufacturers that would have the 780G on the motherboard as well as a discrete solution from ATI, called the 4850, actually working in parallel together where you get about a 70% bump by having the 2 cards together. The Intel solution doesn't use both of the GPUs. What happens is you pull the plug and you go integrated, you plug it back in and you have discrete. And we have that same functionality as well but we go the extra added benefit where the integrated GPU and the discrete GPU are working together. So it's kind of a notch above [the Intel solution]".