Blender friendly processors?

hi, i was just wondering what processor (AMD or Intel) works best with blender? because i would automatically think Intel but the blender website suggests differently:

"Average specs for Hardware

64 bits, Quad Core CPU
8 GB RAM
Full HD Display with 24 bit color
Mouse or trackpad
OpenGL Graphics Card with 2 GB RAM

Production specs for Hardware

64 bits, Dual 8 Core CPU
16 GB RAM
Two times Full HD Display with 24 bit color
Mouse + tablet</b><b>
Dual OpenGL Graphics Cards, quality brand with 3 GB RAM"

Does this mean that for Production specs Intel (i7 extreme included) is completely thrown out of the picture? since they are not 8 core? or is there a feature in intel processors i am not aware of yet??

thanks

My build: I5 3570K, 16gb Ram, 120gb ssd, 1tb hdd, and my soon to be gtx 660 2gb.

The most powerfull procesor made by AMD have 8 cores / 8 threads. The most powerfull i7 have 6 cores but 12 threads.
While rendering the number of threads is important.

However was reading a lot of articles about new FX made by AMD and in benchmarks it is faster then i5.

Do sameone have the most powerfull AMD procesor the new FX? 8 core and can we compare it to some i7 4 core 8 threads?

Note it also says DUAL 8 core CPU’s, so the most common Intel setup would probably be 2 of the 6 core/12 thread i7’s or Xeons which would equate to 12cores/24 threads.

Most production works require the CPU only, since GPU’s often cannot hold such complex scenes in their memory. Hence a large amount of CPU cores helps alot.

Edit: There are also 8 core/16 thread Xeons for those with $$$ to spend

Here is a test with cycles on CPU to compare i5, i7, and amd CPU´s.

Cheers, mib.

If you wait for the next intel release, the ivy bridge extreme processors are supposed to have more than 8 cores
here is the article I found it in

The real speed is in the hyper threading. Now if you are rendering in cycles and want the best option, you probably wont be focusing as much on CPU but rather GPU.

I personally stick with AMD and use the money saved to get better GPUs. My gf’s rig has an amd 8 core, my current one a 6 core. Both far exceed what I would consider satisfactory performance and capability.

Moved from “General Forums > Blender and CG Discussions” to “Support > Technical Support”

Aside from rendering, as far as I know most operations inside Blender are single threaded. And AMD isn’t known for the best single thread performance. If money’s not an issue you’ll get a faster system with Intel.

These specs sound like nonsense to me, I wonder why they are on the official site. First of all, Blender doesn’t take advantage of dual GPUs unless we are talking about GPU rendering with Cycles, in which case it would have to be NVIDIA cards specifically. GPU RAM is also rather unimportant (except for GPU rendering).
There exist dual 8-core (or even 10-core) Intel Xeon workstations (you could go as high as 40-cores on a quad-socket MB) but that’s far from “ordinary” even for “production” specs. And indeed since most parts of Blender are single-threaded, for general usage you’d want an Intel GPU with high clock rate (as you already have). Looking at rendering, the more cores, the merrier.

Hyper Threading gives maybe 20% speedup, on a good use case.