Results: Productivity And Media Encoding
Presumably, ABBYY’s FineReader 11 makes extensive use of AMD’s integer units, as the Athlon X4 750K in its stock form bests Intel’s Pentium G3258. And even though we’re not able to get as-aggressive of an overclock out of it, the Athlon scores a second-place finish, just ahead of the Core i3-4330.
As if to illustrate how well-threaded this task is, Intel’s quad-core Core i5 puts the rest of the field to shame, finishing 37% faster than the well-tuned Athlon. And that’s at its stock clock rate. Then again, the -4690K is a $240 processor, 200% pricier than AMD’s X4 750K. This isn’t a bad showing from the budget chips.
The Pentium and Athlon enjoy big gains from overclocking, but can’t catch the Hyper-Threaded Core i3 or quad-core i5 in our Chrome compilation workload.
Intel’s Pentium G3258 takes a last-place finish and turns it into second place with some heavy overclocking. The Athlon fares better than the Pentium at its stock clock rate, and then falls in behind the tuned dual-core chip when we crank clock rates up.
The same situation shakes out in our HandBrake benchmark, only this time, the overclocked Athlon edges out Intel’s $140 Core i3 to finish third.
Parallelization goes out the window in our LAME workload. A 4.6 GHz Haswell core easily rules this test, trumping the Core i5’s 3.9 GHz maximum Turbo Boost setting. Of course, the K-series CPU can also be readily overclocked, so expect a similar ceiling from that processor.
Unfortunately, AMD gives up a ton of single-core performance due to issues with IPC. A 900 MHz overclock helps the Athlon X4 750K. But even at 4.3 GHz, it can’t catch Intel’s Pentium G3258 at 3.2 GHz.
The same thing happens in iTunes. We won’t dwell on it.
