comparing 2 CPUs for AE rendering

[TimSx]

I've found out that AE uses a single core for rendering. With that being said I am having some difficulties believing I should buy a $45 CPU for my rendering machine.

Take this 2 products for example:

AMD A6-6400K and AMD Ryzen 3 1300X.

https://www.amazon.com/AMD-A6-6400K-Dual-Core-Processor-AD640KOKHLBOX/dp/B00CPLGFM4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UT...

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0741DLVL7/ref=psdc_229189_t2_B06XKVNRSM

They have the same power consumption, similar clockrates, but the 1300X one is almost 3x the cost of the A6-6400K. 

Am I missing something obvious here? Is there any argument why should someone buy 1300X over the cheeper one, if rendering is the main goal here? I won't be doing any ray-traced stuff. Does it make any sense to buy the 1300x, if I am going to shift to 2014 version of AE?

[RjL190365 · Accepted solution]

Forget about the A6-6400K. It is a really lousy, four-year-old dual-core CPU that's slower than even an Intel i3 CPU that's five years old, and is of the lousy Bulldozer/Piledriver architecture that has a very poor implementation of the SSE 4.x support that Adobe software makes heavy use of. It is far inferior to the Ryzen 3 even in single-threaded performance! You might as well have only a dual-core Intel Celeron laptop if you buy that A6-6400K CPU.

Oh, by the way, other Adobe programs make good use of multi-threading. Once again, that A6-6400K falls well short there because it has only two cores and two threads while the Ryzen 3 1300X has four cores and eight threads. As such, that A6-6400K is well over three times slower than the R3-1300X in most apps.

Put this comparison in automotive terms, comparing the A6-6400K to the R3-1300X is like comparing a 1986 Hyundai Excel to a 2006 Honda Civic. The newer Civic is so much better than that piece of junk Excel (Hyundai did not achieve very good quality until the latter half of the 2000s).

In other words, that A6-6400K is worth much less than $45. In fact, I wouldn't pay even $20 for that CPU.

[TimSx]

Thank you RjL190365 for a quick reply! You mentioned Adobe uses SSE4.x. How do you know which processor support this feature adequately? I mean, what feature do I search for when buying a processor for AE?

Bulldozer / Piledriver architecture are a no go. Is there some preferred architecture? This is probably the same question as "Does it have SSE4.x support"

[Bill_Gehrke]

• Instruction Set Extensions SSE4.1/4.2, AVX2

This is what you look for.

[TimSx]

Thank you Bill Gehrke! I've picked up a few processor that have sse 4.1/4.2 and avx2 support.

AMD Ryzen 5 1600x 6x 3.60 GHz https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+5+1600

Intel Core i7-6700K 4x4GHz https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-6700K+%40+4.00GHz

AMD Ryzen 7 1700 8x3 GHz https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+7+1700&id=2970

If 2 cpus have sse and avx2 support, should you buy the one that has the biggest sum of clockspeeds (4x4GHz = 16GHz) or the one with highest clockspeed per core. AE in question is AE 2014. I mean, how do you choose? Benchmarks give you some idea, but then again... I do not how these benchmarks transfer to After Effects.

[Bill_Gehrke]

For Premiere I would go with the Ryzen 7 1700 look at those two processors in my PPBM CPU table.

For AE I might guess that the i7-6700K with the slightly faster clock speed might be better.  But then I rarely ever used AE let alone tested it.  As you can see from my CPU data the Premiere efficiency has the Ryzen with 2x the power.

I just looked at the Ryzen specs and its Turbo clock is 3.7 GHz and the i7-6700K is 4.2 GHz so it is not as great a difference as the first look.

[TimSx]

Thank you for your time. And lovely website you've got going