I always thought bigger number = better in the terms of pc components. Recently ive learned i5s can compete with i9s. I saw a post one day that said “i could replace your processors with i3’s and almost none of you would even notice”
How does this work?
In: Technology
Since the car analogies seem to work well, and in addition to what was already said about CPU speed not being the only important thing: a 1920’s top of the line sports car likely won’t compare too favorably with a cheap modern car.
i3/5/7/9 are product lines. A 1th generation Core i7-920 will still be much slower than a 13th generation Core i3-1315U (by about a factor of 4 in the PassMark rating).
Another issue, especially in laptops, is thermal throttling. Faster CPUs (from the same generation) typically generate more heat. In laptops, you’re often limited by the amount of heat you can get rid of, so the faster CPU will have to be artificially slowed down because it would otherwise get too hot.
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