Phenom 820 Vs. Intel i3

Cores and Manufacture

The AMD Phenom II X4 820 has the "II" and "X4" designations because it belongs to the second production cycle of Phenom chips and has four cores, or processing units. The Intel Core i3 are strictly dual-core CPUs, thus making them half as powerful. However, while the 820 used the 45-nanometer manufacturing process, the Core i3 relies on the 32-nm manufacturing process, making it a smaller chip.

The AMD Phenom II X4 820 has a processing speed of 2.8 GHz. It also has a 2-GHz data transfer speed, which translates into 2 gigatransfers per second, using AMD's HyperTransport technology. The first-generational Intel Core i3 chips -- the i3-530, i3-540, i3-550 and i3-560 -- have a data transfer of 2.5 GT/s using Intel's Direct Media Interface. The second-generational chips -- the i3-2100, i3-2100T, i3-2105 and i3-2120 -- double the data transfer speed to 5 GT/s.

Each AMD Phenom II X4 820 and Intel Core i3 processor has three caches -- a Level 1 cache, Level 2 cache and Level 3 cache -- that it uses for high-speed access to the desktop's most frequently used data. AMD lists the storage capacity as 512 KB for the L1 cache, 2 MB for the L2 cache and 4 MB for the L3 cache. Intel gives the i3's L3 cache storage capacity as 4 MB for the first generation and 3 MB for the second generation. While the 820 consumes up to 95 watts of power, the i3 is more efficient with 73 W for the first generation and 65 W for the second generation.

Both 64-bit processors, the AMD Phenom II X4 820 and Intel Core i3 have virtualization technology, which allows multiple operating systems to use the processors' resources from one computer. The i3, however, additionally has a built-in graphics chipset called Intel HD Graphics, enabling the CPU to provide the desktop with basic graphics processing.