OCTOBER 2019 PCWorld 77them to be used. Is it worth it? One example of
“future proofing” was the SSE support in the
Pentium III. It offered minimal practical benefits
when launched in 1999 but rapidly became
worth its weight in gold once MP3 encoders
supported it. With 10th gen, only the
10nm-based Ice Lake CPUs have AVX512.
QUICK SYNC VIDEO
ENCODING PERFORMANCE
Quick Sync is specialized video encoding
hardware in Intel CPUs with integrated
graphics support. The 10th-gen Ice Lake
features Intel’s newest encoding engine, which
can be dramatically faster especially with
newer HEVC/H.265 CODECs. Applications
will need to be updated to support the faster
performance. If video conversion using the
newest formats is important to you, the
10th-gen Ice Lake should rank higher.
MULTI-CORE WORKLOADS
LIKE VIDEO EDITING
More cores are generally going to be better
for most advanced content creation chores
such as video editing, 3D modeling, or
advanced photo tools that support the
additional cores. You might also want to look
to multi-core performance CPUs if you like to
run multiple apps that are CPU-intensive at
the same time. A CPU with more cores tends
to outperform one with fewer cores when
multi-tasking heavily, so look to the CPU with
the most cores for that job. In this case, it’s the
Core i7-10710U.
However, if your idea of multi-tasking is
having Chrome open alongside Outlook,
Word, and Excel, then a quad-core or even
dual-core would likely be perfectly fine, as long
as it’s paired with enough RAM and an SSD.SINGLE-CORE WORKLOADS
LIKE PHOTO EDITING OR
OFFICE
Most applications, even new ones, usually
don’t take advantage of multi-core CPUs.
These apps instead tend to get more
performance from just a core or two running
at very high clock speeds or with greater
efficiency. Yes, Megahertz still matters. For