AMD Athlon 240GE and 220GE Review: Retaking the Low Ground

Rendering, Encoding and Compression

Rendering

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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

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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.

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