Intel's upcoming Kaby Lake Pentium processors will now also support Hyper Threading, the only major difference with Core i3 CPUs is now the support of the AVX2 instruction set. The information comes from the Dutch website Hardware.info who confirmed the information with Intel.
(Image credit: Hardware.info and users Sw333t and J_C_W)
Intel's website states that the Pentium G4560, G4560T, G4600, G4600T and G4620 will all support Hyper Threading. Previous Pentium chips normally featured a maximum of two cores and two threads with the exception of a special model that was on the market a couple of years ago.
With the addition of Hyper Threading the Pentium CPU have become pretty similar to Core i3 CPUs. According to Hardware.info the major difference is now the support of the Advanced Vector Extensions 2 (AVX2) instruction set which becomes clear by comparing the CPUs on Intel's website.
When comparing the Core i3 7300T and Pentium G4560, which both run at 3.50 Ghz, the main differences appear to be the cache of respectively 4MB and 3MB, the TDP of respectively 35W and 54W and indeed the support of AVX2. But the major difference is the price, the Pentium has a MSRP of $64, while the Core i3 has a MSRP range of 138.00 - $147.00.
The AVX2 instruction set that is missing on the Pentium CPUs was introduced with Haswell and should optimize the performance of floating point operations. AVX2 is mainly an advantage for high intensity database and video processing.
The information was confirmed by Intel's chat support.
