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Rendering, Encoding & Compression
Rendering
Threaded workloads remain an uncontested strength of AMD's Zen-based processors and their hefty core counts. But tasks that are also affected by memory performance, such as Blender, allow Core i7 to claim a lead. The multi-core Cinebench and POV-Ray tests are dominated by the Ryzen line-up.
At stock settings, Core i7-8086K lead the -8700K in our single-core POV-Ray and Cinebench benchmarks. Overclocking opened up a much wider gap between the two CPUs.
Encoding & Compression
LAME is a single-threaded workload that typically illustrates the advantage of higher clock rates and IPC throughput. Not surprisingly, then, Core i7-8086K's frequency advantage lead to a win.
Our threaded compression and decompression tests work directly from system memory, removing storage throughput from the equation. Thus, we found that performance scaled according to core/thread count.
y-cruncher, a single- and multi-threaded program that computes pi using AVX instructions, kept itself isolated to one core during our single-threaded test, allowing the Core i7-8086K to flaunt its higher frequency relative to the -8700K. Conversely, the multi-threaded y-cruncher test reminded us that both processors have the same multi-core Turbo Boost frequencies.
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