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
Intel’s CPUs go in generations, each generation generally being better than the one prior. Between some generations, it meant the way the circuits were printed was different, printing finer ones allowing for denser circuitry.
The 13th generation features the i5-13600 and the i9-13900. The 13600 has 6 performance cores and 8 efficiency cores, while the 13900 has 8 performance cores and 16 efficiency cores. The number of cores is how many different tasks as part of the same program can the CPU work on – the CPU switches between running programs many times in a second, but a properly written program can split its work into many sub-tasks that can be done at the same time so that they aren’t switched between, they go simultaneously.
Intel’s CPUs, since some generation, can alter their clock rate to bring it up when needed. In the olden times, CPUs just sat on one clock speed all the time and you could mod your computer to bring it up a bit past the safe one the manufacturer set, which could still be bearable; now they do it themselves. At the top end, the 13600’s performance cores can go to 5 Gigahertz and the 13900’s can go a bit higher, to 5.2 or more. Clock speed means how fast the CPU goes through steps, because ultimately all it does is do math operations in steps.
The 13900 also has more cache. Cache is like a place to put saved numbers, because referring to numbers stored in the RAM is many times slower than referring to the numbers in the cache, so if a number was saved in the cache and hasn’t changed, then it can be referred to quickly for another operation.
But I digress. Yes, the 13900 has better numbers – more cores, more cache, cores can clock a bit faster when they need to. But the real question is – what are you doing that really needs all that power?
If you run an improperly written program, like an old version of Dwarf Fortress, it isn’t split into subtasks, so you’ll only have one core work on all of it, and in terms of one core, the 13600 can go nearly as fast as the 13900.
If you run something that just isn’t all that demanding, like a game from ten years ago, then it’ll just run fine on both – the 13600 will do all the math of updating the game state 60 times a second and so nothing will stutter or anything.
You need to do something that’s properly demanding to notice.
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