Curious question, irrespective of ram & everything else, which processor is faster/better. This AMD one or this Intel one:

HP EliteDesk 705 G3 SFF Business Desktop PC, AMD Quad A10 PRO-8770 up to 3.8GHz, 8G DDR4, 500G, WiFi, BT 4.0, DVD, Windows 10 64 Bit
https://www.amazon.com/HP-EliteDesk-...s%2C114&sr=8-1

vs.

HP EliteDesk 800 G1 SFF Computer Intel i5 3.20Ghz
https://www.amazon.com/HP-EliteDesk-...s%2C100&sr=8-1

Not sure about the i5, not enough information, Try searching i5-4210M vs AMD PRO A10-8770

https://www.cpu-world.com/Compare/75..._i5-4210M.html

3.8GHz should be marginally faster than 3.2GHz - but I would look at other things too, e.g. are they both using DDR4 ram, at what speed, front side bus speed, etc.

The AMD A10 uses the somewhat lackluster Excavator core, a late Bulldozer revision. One of the issues with that architecture was that the FPU modules were shared between two cores, which turned out to be a bottleneck.

Still, with four physical cores compared with the Core i5's two cores with hyperthreading, and a 700MHz speed difference in the AMD CPU's favour to boot, in general the A10 beats the Core i5 hands down. Even in single-threaded benchmarks the AMD is the clear winner, albeit with a slimmer margin.

The A10 PRO-8770 on cpubenchmark.com
The Core i5-650 on cpubenchmark.com

The AMD A10 has integrated Radeon graphics, and compared with a discrete Radeon card the performance is nothing to write home about. However, if you instead compare it with the integrated Intel HD Graphics of the Intel Q87 Express chipset used by the HP EliteDesk 800 G1, it suddenly looks quite snappy.

There basically is no answer. The type of work in one distro using one workload might be answerable but no general statement could ever be made as the variables are too great.
CPU performance sites or sites like Phoronix might offer clues.

What you ask might seem like a simple question, but it's really not. A CPU is only one part of a whole. A computer with a fast CPU, but a slow GPU, will suck at 3d rendering (animation and gaming), but a slow CPU with a fast GPU might have great performance. A fast CPU will be good at computational functions, but without lots of RAM, might not be good for IO intensive applications, such as file servers or video rendering.

I personally don't play games, but I do file IO, and run multiple VMs, so what's important to me is lots of RAM and SSD. I barely notice the bottleneck of low-end CPU.

Yes, from my side both of them stand (or sit?) in their sockets, neither is faster than the other.
You cannot use CPUs without additional hardware, like mobo and ram and others, and also you cannot compare hardware without software, so irrespective of anything they are all just waiting for clock ticks. Probably AMD waits a bit faster and intel a bit better.

Anytime I buy a computer, the CPU selection is generally of lesser importance than the amount of RAM. This is really the thing that you want to "maximize." Because it doesn't matter that you're driving a Lamborghini if you're stuck in traffic behind a Yugo on a road that's too narrow.

Perhaps the quote of the century -> "It doesn't matter that you're driving a Lamborghini if you're stuck in traffic behind a Yugo on a road that's too narrow.[/QUOTE]

The i5. 4th generation (Haswell) i5's were 4 core, 4 thread for desktop(since this is a 800 G1, it used Haswell). Given the 3.2GHz speed, it's probably a 4430, base 3.0 GHz, turbo 3.2 GHz. A quad core i5 will beat a dual-module (~quad core) Excavator. It will be close and on some CERTAIN jobs the A10 could be faster, but overall, the Intel will be the superior CPU.

https://gadgetversus.com/processor/amd-processors-list/
https://www.intel.com/content/dam/su...omparsion.xlsx
https://www.intel.com/content/dam/su...son-Chart.xlsx

Wouldn't the Radeon GPU on the AMD still be superior to the Intel GT2 graphics though? It may have some advantages for video decoding too (according to a quick web search its a few years newer). I agree on Excavator being, in general, worse off on a core-for-core to Haswell for most tasks, but I'm doubtful either of these systems offers much in terms of expansion, and like other posters have said - I agree that the CPU isn't the whole ball of wax for how well a system will run. Final thought: according to the same quick web searching, that AMD is a Socket AM4 chip - perhaps there's more of an upgrade path for that machine as a result (say, to a Ryzen G).

The onboard graphics technically will be superior on the A10, however, both at this point are steaming piles of uselessness for acclerating anything. This is the old GCN 2.0 based IGP, and so while it is quite a bit more powerful than the ancient Intel IGP, it's still so hopelessly out of date that most modern software won't benefit from it enough to make it worth choosing. Now, if the BIOS will allow a drop in for the Zen-based Athlons or a Ryzen G, then sure, it's a better system...but it still doesn't change the fact that the Intel is the better of these 2 CPU's, which is specifically what OP was asking, not the systems.

I was curious so I looked it up more when I had a minute:

- The 8770 is based on GCN 3.0, which is similar to the Radeon Fury add-in cards (fairly close to the RX 400/500 series as well), and features support for h265 acceleration, along with good support under the amdgpu drivers (it will support Vulkan as well, as a result).

- The Intel likely has HD Graphics 4600 (or something very similar), which lacks h265 acceleration, and appears to have at least basic Vulkan 1.0 support under the linux drivers.

Both have h264 and MPEG support, and neither appear to support the Google codecs (but a lot of add-in GPUs don't do that, even today).

Depending on use-case, I think the 8770 may 'feel' like the better CPU/SoC (e.g. streaming video or similar multimedia tasks) due to the UVD 6.0 functionality (I can speak from experience: un-assisted Haswell systems do not handle 4K video playback very well), despite the Haswell having somewhat more robust x86 cores. Use-case probably matters to make a determination of which is better for a given task.

I also went looking for info the Ryzen drop-in and apparently there's a bunch of subversions of that HP system and some of them have some limited support, and the others do not, despite being AM4 boards with B350 chipsets. Probably at this point I would pass on both of these systems if given a choice, or unless they were offered at a really good deal, and pick something with a newer SoC to ensure more video support, but the 8770 looks more compelling to me on the sole reasoning that if this needs to handle multimedia, it should fare better with GCN 3.0. But as you point out: that isn't saying much, and for running demanding games or similar neither of these were ever barnburners on the GPU side.