I love Intel as much as anyone. They make cool products, they engage in lots of community stuff,
and I mean, heck, they're even a major sponsor of my other channel. But man,
when it comes to confusing product naming schemes, I think Core i3, Core i5, Core i7 takes the cake.
I mean, great question! What is a Core i7-4790K? What the heck does all of this even mean?
We'll get to that, but first a bit of background about why we need product names for processors.
Wouldn't it be simpler to just label them with how many gigahertz they run? I didn't call it a day.
Simpler, sort of, but at times actually even more confusing. For example, when the Pentium 4 launched,
an equivalently clocked Pentium 3 was actually faster because it could do more work with each
cycle. As a customer, I would expect the product with the higher number to be the better one,
and therein lies the problem. Not all megahertz and gigahertz are created equal,
and rating products that way is
about like rating the performance of a car based on what RPM the engine runs at. It's not actually a real
indication of how fast the processor is, but it happened. Now, one of AMD's attempts to move away from this started in the early
2000s with their PR or
performance rating naming scheme, where their processors were given a four-digit model number that enthusiasts believe was based on the performance
AMD felt that they delivered compared to an Intel CPU of that clock speed, but this fixed nothing.
They were still,
indirectly naming according to clock speed, and it wasn't until Intel introduced the Core series, a line of CPUs that
dramatically outperformed their predecessors at much lower clocks, that the megahertz war ended because Intel
needed to shift their marketing away from frequency. So here's what we have today.
Other than the very bare-bones Pentium SKUs, a Core i3 will be your most basic option, with two processing cores and
hyper-threading. More about this feature here. For better multitasking,
it will have a smaller cache, it'll consume less power, and it'll generally perform worse than a Core i5,
but it'll cost less, which leads us to the Core i5.
I wish I could say it was as simple as, well, Core i3s have two cores, and Core i5s have four cores.
The number of cores equals n minus one, where n is the number after the little i.
But it's not. Mobile Core i5s have two cores and hyper-threading, while desktop ones,
mostly, have four cores and no hyper-threading.
But, what they all have in common is improved onboard graphics and turbo boost.
More about this feature here. For temporary performance enhancements, when your system needs a little bit more oomph.
And with oomph in mind, Core i7s. Number one, all Core i7s have hyper-threading for heavy workloads, and number two,
that's the noise your brain is gonna make as I finish my explanation here.
A Core i7 can have anywhere from two processing cores in an Ultrabook, all the way up to eight in a workstation.
It might support anywhere from two sticks of memory, all the way to eight, and it can have a TDP anywhere from around 10 watts,
all the way to a hundred and thirty watts.
So there is a ton of variety here.
And that's for a reason.
Core i7s tend to have more cache, faster turbo boost, and better onboard graphics than the lower tier processors.
And I guess, other than that, the best summary I can give is this.
A Core i7 represents the best thing Intel could build for a given use case, with the biggest drawback being the higher price tag.
So, when you boil it down, that's all the i-whatever numbers represent.
They did better best within a given segment. Beyond that, on their own, they're pretty much meaningless.
The numbers and letters afterwards sort of mean something, if you use the guide from before.
But the safest way to shop is to dig around in Arc, and look at the features,
core counts, and clock speeds of the CPUs you're comparing, to figure out how they stack up.
With the good news being that as long as you compare within one brand, and within the same product generation,
those metrics will actually mean something.
Speaking of mean, Fractal Design is back buying up
all of my advertising inventory for the sole purpose of making me do stupid crap on camera for y'all,
instead of talking about the great quality and clean Scandinavian design of their PC cases, power supplies, and cooling products.
Mind you, I don't know who to be mad at at this point, because it was you, not Fractal, who posted
let's make them do the sponsor spot on Helium on their Facebook page. I mean, thanks a lot, guys!
I mean, genuinely, thanks for watching, guys. Like or dislike the video accordingly,
leave a comment with suggestions for future Fastest Possibles, and as always,
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