Can somebody give me a break down of modern CPU's?

M

myHowUchanged

New Member
I have been out of the game for a few years. Now I see I3, I5, I7 and am utterly confused. Last I remember, duo core were awesome, and quad core were even better, and all had the GHZ abbreviation next to them so it was easy to see what you had.

For example on this laptop I have a dual core 2.0 GHZ. So, that really acts as 4.0 GHZ.

What is the deal with I3, I5, and I7? Are they better than Quadcore? Or can they also be Quadcore? What happened to them being measured in GHZ? I look up laptops, and I see no GHZ just the "I" followed by its number (3,5 or 7) and then some other bologna.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks
 
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Responses aren't instant. Be patient. Your thread has only been here for 4 hours.

Okay first of all, a dual core 2.0ghz DOES NOT run at 4.0ghz. It just means there are 2x 2ghz cores on a single processor die.

The i3, i5, and i7 are all just the newest generation of processors by Intel. i3's are dual cores, i5's are dual and quad cores, and i7's are quad and 6-core processors. Most (if not all I think) have hyper-threading, which in turn mimics an additional (virtual) core for each physical core. I'm an AMD person myself, so I don't follow Intel a whole lot. Check the Wiki for more info.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Core

I can help a bit more though. Processing speed doesn't matter as much as it used to. With a single core it matters, but with multi-core processors, each core can take on a task, while another core can handle another (multi-tasking). It's simply more efficient.

More here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-core_processor
 
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Thank you. Interesting though. I did look over that wiki prior to posting here and that is why I posted here, it was a bit confusing haha. So the GHZ don't matter as much? It is almost mind boggling. So an I3 could be better than a quad core from 2007, running at 2.3GHZ each?

Thanks
 
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