Rendering, Encoding & Compression
Rendering
Although Hyper-Threading is a great addition to Intel's Pentium family, the dual-core architecture cannot compete with true quad-core designs in heavily parallelized benchmarks like Cinebench and the Corona rendering test. Axing AVX support also hurt the Pentiums in Blender, which is optimized for CPUs able to accelerate AVX2 instructions.
Of course, Intel still enjoyed an advantage over AMD in our single-threaded rendering tests due to superior per-core performance. But did you notice that the Kaby Lake-based Core i3-7100 beat the newer Core i3-8100 in many of those lightly-threaded tasks? Although Intel doubled the number of physical cores on its Coffee Lake-based Core i3s, the company had to cut Core i3-8100's clock rate by 300 MHz in the process, slowing it down in certain benchmarks.
Encoding & Compression
Our threaded compression and decompression tests pull data directly from system memory, removing storage from the equation. This force-feeds the cores with information, giving quad-core models an advantage.
The difference between AMD's AVX-capable Ryzen processors and Intel's Pentiums was clear during our HandBrake and y-cruncher tests. AVX instructions are becoming more common in productivity applications, which makes Ryzen 3 2200G a better value in those types of workloads.
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