Conclusion: It's not a mystery that Intel's platform sound quality is better than AMD's!

Summary of professional institution analysis:
AMD integrates related audio processing units into the CPU, making it more susceptible to interference from high-frequency internal data streams. AMD motherboard manufacturers can solve this by throttling USB channels or using older decoders (some high-end motherboards do this).

Main Text:
Recently, TechPowerUp specifically analyzed the differences in audio performance between Intel and AMD platforms. The reason is not the audio chips themselves, but the fundamental differences in the architecture of their audio channel architectures. In recent years, motherboard manufacturers have introduced new USB interface audio chips such as Realtek ALC4080 and ALC4082, supporting 32-bit/384kHz and DSD audio decoding.

However, many players have noticed that regardless of which audio chip is used, Intel's platform performs better than AMD's. Under high system load, AMD platforms occasionally experience pops or audio interruptions, whereas Intel does not have this issue.

The motherboard's audio unit

PC onboard audio has long used Intel's HDA audio standard established in 2004, supporting up to 24-bit/192kHz. However, as 32-bit high-sampling audio and native DSD formats became widespread, HDA bus bandwidth became insufficient, and new generations of codecs began to switch to USB 2.0 interfaces.

Although the transmission interface has changed, the architecture still transmits via HDA channelsThe difference is that Intel places HDA on the PCH southbridge, while AMD directly integrates HDA into the CPU.

Here, we need to introduce the concept of DPC latency spikes,ComputerMany audio issues are caused by DPC delays, which are part of Windows systems used to efficiently handle drivers. If one driver takes longer to process, it may prevent other operations from being processed.

When the system is performing high-bandwidth operations simultaneously, such as transferring large files from an NVMe SSD, the Wi-Fi 7 network card remains intactDownloadIf the audio interface is also on the chipset side, it will encounter DPC latency spikes, directly manifesting as audio pops or interruptions.

A common high-end motherboard

The advantage of the Intel platform lies here: the audio chip connects to the HDA unit on the PCH via USB 2.0, then passes through the PCH's DMI(Direct media interface) Connect to the CPU. DMI is essentially PCIe at the physical layer, but Intel encapsulates a complex protocol layer on top of it, providing hardware-level QoS (Quality of Service) mechanisms.

When the system is under high loadDMI's QoS prioritizes delay-sensitive isochronous data transmission, such as audio streams and network packets, allowing them to bypass NVMe solid-state drives or SATA RAID controller causes congestion, effectively preventing popping noise caused by DPC.
AMD adopts a highly integrated design, directly integrating most functions into the CPU. Normally, the USB audio chip is most straightforward to connect to the CPU's native USB port, but this takes up a set of USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports.

Therefore, motherboard manufacturers prefer to use the CPU's native high-speed port as the USB 3.2 Gen 2 port for the rear panel, so most AMD motherboards connect the USB 2.0 audio chip to the FCH southbridge's USB 2.0 port.

An AMD platform motherboard

The problem is that AMD's FCH and CPU use the standard PCIe protocol, with no audio priority mechanism. When the chipset bus is instantly full, audio data is interrupted due to queue delays, resulting in popping sounds.

So, can connecting the USB audio chip to the CPU's native USB port solve the problem? No, when the AMD CPU is fully loaded with I/O, USB audio packets also have no QoS priorityEven the native CPU interface is only slightly better, not a complete solution.

For this reason, some high-end AMD motherboards that prioritize audio quality are willing to sacrifice higher-spec USB audio chips in favor of older generation codecs using traditional HDA channels to avoid loud noise under high system load.

For general users, DPC latency only triggers under specific hardware load conditions, which is not easily noticed in daily use, but forGamesFor gamers, high-load system scenarios are more common. If you encounter occasional audio interruptions or pops after switching from Intel to AMD, architectural differences are the main reason.

The motherboard's audio and PCIe capacitors