In the past few years, Intel’s low-end CPU models are increasingly receiving a lot of love from the user community thanks to the significantly improved performance / price. Pentium Gold G7400 Alder Lake can be considered a good example when this chip gives extremely impressive performance in the Cinebench benchmark rating scale, even though it only has a dual-core configuration.
Specifically in terms of specifications, the Intel Pentium Gold G7400 has 2 cores and 4 threads, built on the 10nm ESF Golden Cove core architecture. This is a very basic dual-core processor with a clock speed of 3.7 GHz. The CPU comes with 6MB of L3 cache and 2.5MB of L2 cache in a TDP package of only 46W. As an “entry-level” design for the general user, this chip costs just US$64.
In terms of performance, the Intel Pentium Gold G7400 has been tested in both Cinebench R23 and Cinebench R15 rating scales. In R23, the Intel Pentium Gold G7400 scored 3814 multi-core performance points and 1396 over-core performance points. In R15, this chip scored a total of 543 multi-core and 205 single-core points. For comparison, the experts used Computerbase’s public Cinebench R23 benchmark archive, which lists benchmark results of a variety of CPU models. The results show that the performance level that the Intel Pentium Gold G7400 delivers is extremely impressive.
From the above results, it can be seen that the Intel Pentium Gold G7400 is only a dual-core CPU, but the performance is not bad compared to many previous quad-core models from AMD, such as the Ryzen 3 3200G. The Zen 2 and Zen 3 models will be much faster due to increased IPC performance and non-monolithic design (Ryzen 4000G/Ryzen 5000G has only been offered to the DIY segment recently). However, a dual-core CPU that gives performance almost on par with a quad-core is impressive. Compared to its predecessor Pentium Gold G6400, Pentium Gold G7400 is also up to 30% faster. This is a great improvement for the low-end segment who are looking for better performance in the sub-$100 range.
Intel’s new generation Pentium and Celeron chips are almost twice as fast as AMD’s Athlon CPUs. And although AMD is planning to bring to market the new Athlon 4000G chip line with many improvements soon, it will still be difficult to beat the power of Golden Cove cores, especially in single-core performance tests.
In addition, Intel’s addition of SMT to Pentium models also partly shows that this will be a very valuable product line in gaming, which rarely happens in this low-cost segment.