>On the second desk at SmartShepherd I normally have the first laptop I bought when the company started: an Acer that sported 16gb of memory, ATI graphics and an AMD A10-9600p processor. When I bought it, the research indicated that bang-for-buck this machine was pretty good. It turns out that it was garbage, the main culprit being that A10-9600p. The processor had specifications that suggested it should be about as fast as a mid-range Intel i5 (2017 is when I purchased it).

Did the author only look at the core/frequency and concluded "it should be about as fast as a mid-range Intel i5"? Surely someone who's technically savvy like him would know to look for benchmarks? If we look up benchmarks for the AMD A10-9600P[1] and compared it to a "mid range i5"[2], we see that the intel is about 50% faster despite having approximately the same frequency and half the cores.

[1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-A10-9600P-Bristol-Ridge-No...

[2] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Core-i5-6300U-Notebook-P...