These days, choose a processor that meets your core count needs and budget. Some applications are primarily single-threaded, so for those you might want a processor with fewer, faster cores. For parallelizable tasks like compiling code (up until the linking stage), more cores is better.
It might also be worth buying an AMD just to support them, but OEMs still mostly favor Intel. Performance per dollar is usually a lot better on the AMD side.
And sometimes your new machine is slower than the old one. Ive seen that a couple times with laptops people purchased. They replaced a 2-3 year old laptop that cost $2500 with one that cost $1200 (but lighter thinner) and the new one had the same number of cores, and ran slower.
Depends on the form factor. On desktop yes AMD might be better for your money but as an owner of Ryzen 3500u laptop I'd recommend Intel to anyone. For some reason Chrome is more janky than my old i5 4300u and it lags when playing 1080p x265 files in every player I've tried.
Can you check chrome://gpu and make sure that Video Decode: Unavailable does not appear? Video decode should be handled by your GPU, not the CPU. If this is Linux, then you might not be using the GPU at all, which would explain both symptoms.
Hardware protected video decode and out-of-process rasterization are the only ones unavailable. Everything else is Hardware accelerated. Another thing I notice is that GPU stays a steady 20% and rarely every shoots up, which I believe is what contributes to video player lags. No matter what I try in Windows 10 - performance mode, gaming mode it still won't go beyond 20% when playing videos.
The new Ryzen 4000 laptop APUs are quite an improvement over last year. It's important to note that the APUs of each generation are always an architectural generation behind (so, the 3500U is actual a Zen+ architecture, not Zen 2).
They might be, but I am talking about the situation RIGHT NOW. LTT also talks about this here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nfz46HXvPLc It was very noticeably janky out of the box but with updates it became better but IMO it's still not at Intel's level yet. Also battery life is better on Intel side and will only improve with the 10nm chips they are shipping now. I have yet to try Linux distro on this machine but looking for something with decent touch support, so it's all Windows 10 right now.
It might also be worth buying an AMD just to support them, but OEMs still mostly favor Intel. Performance per dollar is usually a lot better on the AMD side.