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Processors demystified
peteques
Posts: 508 Forum Member
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Hi all,
Can anyone point me to an article that maybe ranks processors in order pls? Which is the best to get eg :Intel Pentium, Celeron, Core i3,i5,i7, AMD E1, A4,A8,A10 etc and the Intel has numbers after it eg i3 4210. How do I know which to get? Thx for any help.
Pete
Can anyone point me to an article that maybe ranks processors in order pls? Which is the best to get eg :Intel Pentium, Celeron, Core i3,i5,i7, AMD E1, A4,A8,A10 etc and the Intel has numbers after it eg i3 4210. How do I know which to get? Thx for any help.
Pete
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Which is the best to get depends on what you want the system for and how much you want to pay. Also there are different ranges of CPUs for mobile computing and PC home applications and PC business applications. How do you know what to get, well there's a question. You'd have to decide what you want to do with the system, and know the differences betwen the CPUs and the graphics setups so you could make the best choice, depending on budget.
Intel Pentium and Celeron are older CPUs but I think there's still a few Celerons being sold on budget machines. However they are very slow and only suited for less demanding tasks. When it comes to the i3, i5, and i7 CPUs, the i stands for Intel and the 3, 5 and 7 for the types of CPU. So roughly speaking (very roughly) the 3 series is generally slower than the 5 series and has a lower spec integrated graphics chip. The 5 series is mid price and mid spec so more often than not will be faster than a 3. The 7 series are quad core as opposed to dual core and will wipe the floor with all the 3 series in demanding tasks and more often than not will be better than a 5.
Then you have the generational model number differences, so 2xxx, 3xxx and 4xxx, where the latest 4th gen was the last introduced by Intel, so has the most up to date architecture and improved speed and efficiency. Intel also give them fancy names, so 4th gen is Haswell, 3rd gen is Ivy Bridge, 2nd gen is Sandy Bridge.
It's futher complicated by the U or M designator (QM for quad core i7s) for laptop mobile CPUs, where the U stands for lower temperature high efficiency, meaning the performance will be slower but the battery times will be longer, as opposed to the M which is higher temperature low efficiency, meaning faster.
There's probably letters for PC CPUs as well, but I don't know what they are, laptops hardware specs is all I know about these days, and now I don't do user home support any more I've lost touch with PC specs.
Really the more you bore down into it the more complicated it becomes, so some CPUs have Turbo Boost, ie they can overclock themselves to deal with system and software demands eg 1.8GHz can boost up to 2.4GHz.
Have a look at this article about Intel CPUs starting with the Cores heading, and then Hyper-threading, then Clock Speed, then Turbo Boost, and the other headings if you want to as well: http://www.expertreviews.co.uk/intel-cpus/1400962/whats-the-difference-between-core-i3-i5-and-i7-processors
As to AMD CPUs I don't know an awful lot about them because the last few years they've been out-classed by Intel in nearly all areas. There's a similar hierarchical performance progression through the numbers though and they are built differently to Intel CPUs. I'll have to leave them to someone else or try a search on Google or your favourite search engine.
I would reword the top paragraph M being mobile performance (the result being higher power consumption, higher temps and shorter battery life) there is still EIST and Turbo Boost to manage the power consumption when idle or when high-duty processing is required.
Basically on Core i-series desktop the letters are T instead of U - power management, S is performance, K designates multiplier-unlocked 'enthusiast' variants, there is also an R designate which is for graphics, but it's not a mainstream product.