IMHO, the single-thread performance/dollar graph at the end of the article says it all. At this price range, I've found that workloads are still mostly single-threaded. The Intel parts are still the king with their decent clock rates and their deep pipelines. The Ryzen 3 1200 is a total dog.
"Total dog" for being 7-13% slower-per-thread but offering twice as many cores? This is ridiculous. I am typing this on a i5 Mac with 2C/4T and the difference in using common office applications (browser, Excel, etc) vs 4C/8T i7 is _insane_. Just using newegg.com is borderline impossible with just a few tabs open unless you have 4 non-SMT threads.
Desktop computing is actually pretty good at utilizing many cores these days: the booting process, starting non-trivial applications, using full-disk encryption, running multiple tabs in a browser (or just having a browser open with a few tabs + something else), in all of these conditions 4c/4t CPU will provide tangible, perceivable difference. 2c/4t CPUs are obsolete and I wouldn't recommend one even for an entry-level computer.
Does the iMac have an SSD? Because that makes a huge difference in UI responsiveness even in web browsing, much more than the CPU at that level anyway.
My experience has been the opposite. For running a browser, I'll take a faster dual core over a slower quad core. Simultaneous tabs are of little use to me if I can't scroll smoothly through Amazon.com.
Unless you are using the chips for something like compiling source code or running VMS, in which case the workloads scale almost linearly and the Zen lineup ends up looking like great value for money.
I said "in this price range". Who is using the lowest-end chips? It's not coders or creators. It's not gamers. It's people browsing the web. The responsiveness is the biggest performance metric in that case, and is directly related to straight-line performance.
I grew up in a developing country, for a long time my computer purchase decisions were overwhelmingly driven by price. Cheaper SKUs see far greater diverse use than you suspect.
