Man in a funny hat shows us some processors
I’m going to make no bones about it, Intel are the current leaders in the mobile CPU market. Their i3, 5, and 7 processors are the best performing and most power friendly CPU’s on the market, though there are some subtle differences between the crop. Whilst you could previous get away with comparing AMD Turion’s with the Intel Core 2 Duo’s, if you are buying a laptop, try to find one with at least an i3 in it, unless you are on a very tight budget, in which some of the T900′s and Core 2 Duo’s are pretty cheap. At the moment, AMD are yet to release anything in the mobile market that beats the i3 processor, which even at the lowest version, is ranking high on aggregated CPU ranking.
So, if we are going to be looking mainly at the intel processors, what’s the deal with them. Well, first of all, we’re not really talking in terms of GHZ and MHZ any more, product numbers, especially when we are on about basics. Firstly, they are pretty much all multi-core processors, so that’s one point we can pretty much end at. The i5 and i7 both have a feature called “turbo boost” which essentially over-clocks the processor to work a little harder when times are tough. For example, the i5 450M, a mid-range i5 clocked at around 2.4GHZ, can push itself to around 2.66. But enough of the numbers, in terms of performance, if you plan on running games reasonably recently, the mid range i5′s I just mentioned will more than adequately perform the job.
i3′s are appearing now as the standard of most entry grade consumer laptops, for good reason. Not too power hungry, nor too under-powered, they offer a balance which the Core 2 Duo couldn’t really achieve. Again, as with the entire series, don’t get too concerned about CPU clock speed, it’s often some of the more complex numbers underneath GHZ that give the full story, such as different levels of cache.
Finally, it comes to the i7′s. Whilst this are at the upper end of most people’s budgets, you may find yourself saying “why are the clock speeds lower?”, such as the i7 720QM that operates at 1.6GHZ. Again, it’s all down to the way that the CPU can actually use and utilise that power, which is where the money goes, on a better chipset and all that guff. However, if you are looking at a i7, there is one main reason, as explained to me by Stevie where they come into their own, Virtualisation.
If you want to run a few virtual machines on a regular basis of full OS’s, then the i7 is the place to be, especially if you are busy in the world of development, with the main downsides being huge power consumption in comparison to the rest of the range (Intel themselves have acknowledged this) and they generate a lot more heat as a result. Well, I say a lot more, it’s going to be pretty noticeable when the system gets running near enough 70% for you to perhaps move the laptop off your lap, but as with all things and cooling and laptops, it honestly does depend purely on the build quality…and a bit of luck.
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Josh Dean
Josh came to Game-Engine after running several other “web destinations” into the ground with constant re-designs and feature sets. After founding a website based about games, which again, suffered the fate of a perfectionist, yet poor, designer, Game Engine was created as a way to channel those energies in the direction of a poor, vunerable website. Afer co-founding Game Engine on a historic moment in intergalatic history, Josh turned his attention to web development yet again, muddled through it, and then started to “write” about what is probably his most normal interest, video games. Now Josh has expanded into poorly recorded screen captures and talking into cameras with painstaking conviction, as well as keeping up playing a lot of video games, then claiming that they are either ‘awesome’ or ‘rubbish’.
