Processor Names

We’ve all faced a time when we were finally allowed by our budget (or our parents) to buy a shiny new laptop. We have our budget, we have the permission and we have our friend, the internet, to provide us a list of all the laptops we can buy. Of course we can just buy the most expensive one and get it over with, but a friend who better understands his use and the hardware that supports it best will be way better off than poor old us.

So here we are to guide you the best we can without getting into much of the technical jargon that comes with each and every part there is. In this small article we will cover the two most used types of processors, their most notable features and the use cases they are designed for. Do note that we will be considering the technical specifications of the processors themselves, not their implementations as other factors such as the ram, type of storage and cooling solution heavily effect a system’s performance and that this list covers only laptops, desktop processors are a whole different story.

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Now lets see which processors we will be talking about here:

· The U-processors

· The HQ-processors

The Humble U:

It won’t be wrong to say that most of the processors we see in laptops are U processors. They are found in low spec internet browsing machines, as well as in premium laptops like the XPS. These processors, with the exception of the 8th gen u-processors with 4 processors, have 2 cores and no more. The i3, i5 and the i7 have the same number of cores but their performance varies.

These processors were designed keeping in mind the power consumption and heat dissipation, both of which are very low. This allows them to have a longer battery life and remain cool even in very thin laptops. These features help manufacturers to make thin and light laptops suitable for transportation and long operating times.

They are mostly designed for normal use cases, like browsing the internet, word formatting, web development, graphic designing etc. All these uses neither require nor take advantage of more than 2 cores. These processors are not weak, they can even run demanding games assuming that the games are not very CPU dependent and you have a graphics card either in your laptop or your laptop is capable of taking advantage of an external GPU (this requires a special port called the thunderbolt port).

This is all fine and dandy but what about that hyper-threading thing that is so special in the i7 processors, there are people who own an i7 u-processor and say that they see 4 cores when they open their device manager. Well both of these questions are related. One of the most significant differences between an i5 and an i7 is hyper threading. Remember that we said that u-processors only have 2 cores, they most definitely have 2 physical cores but what hyper-threading allows is the working of a single core as a dual core therefore effectively allowing a 2 core i7 to show itself as a 4 core processor.

But does that mean this all mean that a dual core hyper threaded i7 will perform the same as a quad core i5 of the same family (assuming they have the same clock speed). No. A true quad core processor will always outperform a hyper-threaded processor (again this differs because of processor architectures and clock speeds) in applications that use 4 cores.

The Beefy HQ:

The HQ in processors stands for high performance graphics and quad core. Therefore these processors, as the name implies, have better on-board graphics and have 4 cores per processor. These 4 cores are operational all the time therefore they produce more heat and consume more energy than u-processors. In the case of 8th generation processors, the Q is omitted because they have 6 cores instead of 4 but still have the high performance graphics.

These processors are designed for performance. We can say that desktop CPUs perform better but in the case of laptop processors, this is the best performance we can get for most use cases. This performance comes at a price; these processors consume more energy and therefore need larger batteries to keep the battery timing acceptable. Adding a larger battery makes the laptop heavier therefore if you plan on travelling then this might not be a better choice. Furthermore these laptops require a lot more cooling therefore thin laptops are not an option.

We might find thin laptops with HQ processors but they are usually expensive and might thermal throttle under loads (i.e slow down under heavy computing loads), don’t worry if you don’t know about thermal throttling, we will cover this in a future article.

They were designed for use cases such as video rendering/encoding, gaming, 3-D rendering etc. So most of the audience it is targeted at are professionals that want a better performing laptop to render and design on the go. These laptops often sustain their boost clocks (increasing their clock speed), but this depends on the cooling solution that is implemented in the laptop. Most of the games being developed today do not use more than 4 cores so these laptops handle gaming loads very well. Video and 3-D rendering can take advantage of more cores therefore it is advised that serious developers use desktop processors with a large number of cores for better results.

Hyper-threading has the same effects in this case as mentioned earlier. An i7 HQ processor will appear as an 8 core processor because of hyper-threading, but due to the fact that most applications do not make use of more than 4 cores even now, makes it hard to justify why a normal person would even need an i7.

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Conclusion:

Even though an i7 may seem superior, we see that it is not usable for most people and only ends up costing them a lot of money for features they will never use. Understanding the use of the processor and spending money on the things that are more useful to you is always the smart thing to do. So whether you are a gamer, a professional or an everyday user you can now select the processor of your choice knowing that it will perform the way you expect it to.

References:

https://ark.intel.com/

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/processors/processor-numbers.html