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
Rather than a car analogy, look at it as a road analogy. the i5 is a two lane highway, with a lower maximum speed. The i9 is an 8 lane highway with a higher maximum speed.
The workload of your application is basically the cars moving through the road. If the number of cars in the i5 is moving along fine, it will perform similarly to the i9, though the i9 may be faster due to the higher speed limit.
If you increase the speed limit of the i5 by overclocking, you can overcome how good the quality of the road is.
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.
Some processors have additional capabilities, such as virtualization or graphics processing. The Bugatti analogy in here is a good one, but it ignores that if you need to go 300 MPH or need better braking or need superior handling, you got it. I think it’s better to have a tool and not need it than need it and not have it, so the i9 is better than the i5.
My first thought is Gen 10 i9 vs Gen 14 i5, the i5 will win
But everything everyone else is saying is also true
* For a given generation, the i3, i5, and i9 are literally the same die, although some will run at lower clock rates or have cores deactivated.
* For most people and most applications, you’re typically using between 0 and 2 P-cores. The other P-cores and the E-cores are idle.
* Even for heavy users, some cores (esp the E-cores) aren’t doing much.
* Thus, a lot of the difference comes down to clock speed. But, a core at 4 GHz that’s idle 3/4 of the time is doing as much as a core at 3 GHz that’s idle 2/3 of the time.
cause there is single core power that is the same on all processors (of the same generation ofc). the difference that i9 gives is that it has more cores. some apps CAN’T use more than 1 core. it’s all the same.
if you have 1 horse vs 10 horses together and the cart only supports one horse then the other 9 horses are just idle.
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