Why you can trust Tom's Hardware Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test.
Rendering, Encoding and Compression
Rendering
Low-end chips obviously aren't ideal for rendering workloads. But aside from a notably poor showing in the Corona test, AMD's Athlons are competitive with Intel's Pentium processors in multi-threaded benchmarks, especially after overclocking.
It takes overclocking to make the Athlon do battle with those same Pentiums during the single-threaded Cinebench and POV-Ray test. However, it's clear that Intel retains its lead in single-threaded benchmarks.
Encoding & Compression
True to what we've seen from other Zen-based processors, the Athlons are more competitive in decompression workloads, mixing it up with the Pentium models, than the compression test.
y-cruncher, a single- and multi-threaded program that computes pi, is a great tool for measuring the effect of AVX instructions. Pentium processors are deliberately handicapped by Intel, rendering them unable to accelerate AVX instruction processing. As a result, the Athlon processors handily outperform the Pentium models in both threaded and single-core tests.
The HandBrake x265 test is heavily optimized for AVX instructions, while the H.264 benchmark uses a lighter distribution. The Athlon processors aren't as competitive in the real-world AVX-heavy tests as they are in the synthetic y-cruncher tests, highlighting that other factors, such as memory and cache latency, can play a bigger role in real-world applications.
MORE: Best Cheap CPUs
MORE: Intel & AMD Processor Hierarchy
MORE: All CPUs Content
