High level developments: * AMD introduced their Ryzen architecture ~3 years ago. This was the first time in years that their chips were competitive with Intel

High level developments: * AMD introduced their Ryzen architecture ~3 years ago. This was the first time in years that their chips were competitive with Intel chips. * AMD's newfound competitiveness forced Intel to increase core counts in their consumer chips. 6 and 8 core chips are now extremely common in the consumer space. * AMD has released consumer chips with as many as 16 physical cores (32 threads) in their most recent generation. This is a huge improvement for tasks that scale well to multiple cores like (I presume) 3D animation. Intel has 10 core consumer chips out. * If you're willing to move up to the HEDT chips you can now buy an AMD Threadripper chip with up to 64 cores (128 threads). * Intel has struggled to make the next step in manufacturing. Their desktop chips have been stuck at 14nm for half a decade now. AMD contracts their manufacturing out and has been able to take advantage of other foundries improved processes. Their current chips are using 7nm process nodes and use significantly less power than their Intel counterparts. Because of this they require less extreme cooling. * There are some new instruction sets such as AVX and AVX512 that can improve performance in some software. I'm not an expert there and you'd probably want to do some research on sites related to 3D rendering to see which chip would perform best for your needs.