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
Imagine a big lorry versus a small car.
If the task at hand is “move twenty pallets of cereal from a warehouse to a supermarket”, the lorry will do that easily but the car will struggle. Now imagine the task is, instead “carrying your groceries home”. The lorry is no better at this task than the car is. In fact, the car can drive faster than the lorry can, and get you to your destination faster.
This general distinction can happen in many places on a modern computer: whether you’re faster doing a single task is separate from whether you’re faster when doing bulk tasks.
This might or might not be true for current-gen i5 vs i9, but it’s definitely a thing. Here’s [a top-of-the-line Threadripper Pro compared to a Ryzen 5](https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/5726vs5033/AMD-Ryzen-Threadripper-PRO-7995WX-vs-AMD-Ryzen-5-7600X). The Threadripper is something like 5x faster than the Ryzen 5, and a fair bit more efficient (gets that 5x out of only 3x as much power consumption), but look at the “Single Thread Rating” line. The Ryzen 5 actually gives you better performance on single-threaded applications! This makes sense: the Threadripper part is meant for high-end workstations suited for large number-crunching workloads, whereas the Ryzen 5 is more at home in gaming PCs.
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