Which processor is better?
I'm looking to buy a new laptop and wasn't sure which processor was better.
Intel® Core™ i7-2677M Processor (4M Cache, up to 2.90 GHz)
Intel® Core™ i5-2520M Processor (3M Cache, up to 3.20 GHz)
Intel® Core™ i5-4200U Processor (3M Cache, up to 2.60 GHz)
Intel® Core™ i5-4210U Processor (3M Cache, up to 2.70 GHz)
Intel® Core™ i5-5200U Processor (3M Cache, up to 2.70 GHz)
Intel® Core™ i5-6200U Processor (3M Cache, up to 2.80 GHz)
These are the processors of the laptops I'm currently looking at. I'm mainly curious as to where the i7 stands seeing how its only 2nd gen, but if someone could list them in order or performance thatd be great.
Thanks
November 26, 2015
4 Comments • Newest first
@piana: I was pleasantly surprised too as to how that turned out.
Thanks for response, didnt expect the i7 to be the worst
Don't bother with anything older than Haswell. I love Sandy Bridge, so much, but on a laptop I would be more concerned with horrible battery lives as they keep making them smaller. Haswell (4000 series) and Skylake (6000 series) have made tremendous strides in power savings since the ivy and sandy days. Even though those chips you listed are undervolted, I bet they still outperform old Sandy chips, and being undervolted along with having a significantly lower TDP in general means much better battery life.
Edit: Oh yeah, I forgot Skylake CPUs have REMOVED the FIVR from the die. I don't know what this means for power consumption next to a Haswell chip due to the die shrink. Maybe they're the same? Well my guess is they are both going to be great and at that point you should just get the newer one if the price difference isn't obtuse. You'd need to ask someone who has studied the Skylake die and overall performance much more than I if you want much more accurate and specific information. I've barely touched it myself, although some of my coworkers have played with some test samples so I could always ask around if you really really want me to come back and report what I learned, but eh. I'm lazy.
First of all, I do want to point out that all of these processors have the same core/thread configuration. That means even the i7-2677M is a dual core processor with Hyper Threading making it quad-threaded.
The general ranking from strongest to weakest is this:
i5-6200U
i5-5200U
i5-4210U
i5-4200U
i7-2677M
So the 2nd-gen i7 is on the bottom.
A benchmark chart I found to order those processors used Cinebench R11.5 64Bit. The scores are as follow:
*i7-6700HQ 7.41 (quad-core with 8-threads, 2.6-3.5 GHz)
*i5-6600K 6.93 (quad-core with 4-threads, desktop part, 3.5-3.9 GHz)
*i5-6300HQ 5.38 (quad-core with 4-threads, 2.3-3.2 GHz)
i5 6200U 2.95
i5-5200U 2.82
i5-4210U 2.55
i5-4200U 2.48
i7-2677M 2.13
*i3-4030U 2.03 (dual-core with 4-threads, 1.9 GHz)
Obviously the 2nd-gen Core i7 doesn't look so hot sitting close to the 4th-gen Core i3. Yet, when you see how much higher the laptop i5 and desktop i5 scored, then the spread for the low-power i5s don't look as dramatic. That i5-6300HQ will only be found in gaming laptops and its maximum power draw / thermal dissipation (45W) is 2.5x that of the U-series i5s (17W.)
Some variance is expected. The same chart had a few sister processors to the i7-2677M (1.8 - 2.9 GHz) and they scored 2.23 for the i7-2637M (1.7-2.8 GHz) and 1.91 for the i7-2657M (1.6-2.7 GHz.)