Intel vs AMD: who gives more CPU per dollar in October 2026?

Short answer: for multi-threaded work, Intel is clearly the better value right now. Its current desktop chips deliver a median of 203 PassMark points per dollar, against 109 for AMD. In every budget up to about $650, the fastest chip you can buy is an Intel one. AMD only takes the absolute top spot, and it charges a lot for the privilege.

Verdict

Intel delivers 1.9× AMD's multi-thread performance per dollar

Median of 8 Intel vs 9 AMD current-generation desktop CPUs, US prices on Oct 3, 2026

I

Intel

Core Ultra 200S / 200S Plus · 8 chips

203pts per $ (median)

Best value

Core Ultra 5 245KF

Its score

242 pts/$ · $178

A

AMD

Ryzen 9000 · 9 chips

109pts per $ (median)

Best value

Ryzen 5 9600X

Its score

173 pts/$ · $174

Shares: at publication vs now

Each company’s share price is frozen at the last close before this post (Friday, October 2, 2026, since the post went out on a Saturday). The live price is fetched every time the page loads, so the difference below is always current. Nothing here suggests that CPU prices drive share prices; it only shows how both companies have moved since.

Intel INTC

At publication

$119.33

Oct 2, 2026 close

→

Now

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Difference since publication

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AMD

At publication

$633.91

Oct 2, 2026 close

→

Now

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Difference since publication

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Source: Yahoo Finance daily closes. Live data refreshes on page load.

What was compared

Both companies’ current desktop generations, as sold in the US on October 3, 2026:

• AMD Ryzen 9000 (Zen 5, socket AM5), 9 models from the Ryzen 5 9600X to the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2.
• Intel Core Ultra 200S and 200S Plus (Arrow Lake and Arrow Lake Refresh, socket LGA1851), 8 models from the Core Ultra 5 225 to the Core Ultra 9 285K.

“Quality” here means multi-thread performance: the PassMark CPU Mark, which averages thousands of user-submitted runs of the same test for each chip. Value is simply CPU Mark ÷ price. The full method and its limits are at the end.

Price against performance

Sources: PassMark CPU Mark (multi-thread), PassMark listed US prices retrieved Oct 3, 2026.

The blue dots sit almost entirely above the red ones at the same price. The Intel cluster between $178 and $330 is the story: the Core Ultra 5 245KF, Core Ultra 5 250K Plus and Core Ultra 7 270K Plus all land at or above the line of 200 points per dollar. No AMD chip gets there. The best AMD value, the Ryzen 5 9600X, reaches 173.

The ranking

Sources: PassMark CPU Mark, PassMark listed US prices retrieved Oct 3, 2026.

The top six places all go to Intel. The best AMD entry, the Ryzen 5 9600X, comes in seventh. The bottom of the table belongs to AMD’s X3D chips (9800X3D, 9850X3D, 9950X3D2). They carry a large stacked L3 cache that helps in games but does little for multi-thread benchmarks, and their price includes that cache.

Removing X3D chips makes the comparison fairer to AMD, but Intel still leads: the AMD median rises to 141 points per dollar, against Intel’s 203.

What a given budget buys

Sources: PassMark CPU Mark, PassMark listed US prices retrieved Oct 3, 2026.

The step chart answers a buyer’s question directly: with $X to spend, how fast a chip can I get?

• Up to $200: Intel’s Core Ultra 5 245K scores 43,046 vs 30,040 for AMD’s Ryzen 5 9600X. That is 43% more.
• Up to $350: the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus ($315) scores 68,436 vs 54,292 for the Ryzen 9 9900X, 26% more.
• Up to $550: the 270K Plus is still Intel’s fastest chip. AMD’s Ryzen 9 9950X ($549) gets close at 65,708, but costs $234 more.
• Above $650: AMD wins outright. The Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 tops the chart at 72,018, just 5% above the 270K Plus, for 2.9× the price.

What the numbers leave out

This is a narrow question on purpose, and the answer depends on what the CPU is for:

• Gaming. The X3D chips that look poor here are generally the fastest gaming CPUs. A gaming-focused comparison would rank AMD much higher.
• Platform cost. The study counts the processor only. Motherboard and memory prices differ between AM5 and LGA1851, and AM5 has a longer upgrade path. Intel is expected to move to a new socket next generation.
• Power. The 65 W Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X use less power than Intel’s 125 W K-series chips. Over years of heavy use, that eats into Intel’s price advantage.
• Prices move weekly. These are prices from one day. The data section links the source pages so the numbers can be checked.

Data

Download the price dataset, including excluded chips and the Tom’s Hardware cross-check prices: cpus.csv. Benchmark scores are not included, as PassMark only permits personal, non-commercial reproduction of its data; each row links to the chip’s PassMark page instead.

Methodology

• Performance: PassMark CPU Mark (multi-thread) and Single Thread Rating, read on October 3, 2026 from each chip’s page on cpubenchmark.net. PassMark scores are averages of user-submitted results, so they mix stock and tuned systems.
• Prices: the US retail price PassMark lists for each chip on October 3, 2026. As a cross-check, they were compared with the “best US price” in Tom’s Hardware’s CPU Price Index (updated October 2, 2026). The two agree within $1 for 10 of the 12 chips both sources list. The exceptions are the Core Ultra 7 265KF ($309.57 on PassMark vs $378 on Tom’s) and the Core Ultra 5 245K ($189.99 vs $179). Neither difference changes the ranking between brands.
• Excluded: the Ryzen 5 9600 (its listed price had not been refreshed recently) and the Core Ultra 9 290K Plus (no US retail price and only 4 benchmark samples). Chips with fewer than 50 benchmark samples are excluded automatically.
• Stocks: daily closes from Yahoo Finance. The publication snapshot was saved with yfinance; live prices come from a small server function that queries Yahoo Finance when the page loads.
• Code: collection and analysis are plain Python scripts (collect.py, analyze.py, snapshot_stocks.py). They save every source page as raw HTML, so each number can be traced back to where it came from.
• Trademarks: Intel, Core Ultra, AMD and Ryzen are trademarks of their respective owners. This site is independent and not affiliated with or sponsored by Intel or AMD.