Blogs Don’t be fooled by Laptop CPUs

Remember back a few years when the pentium m range hit the market (followed by merom). Those CPUs kicked ass paired with a desktop based motherboard (they weren't shabby in a laptop either....) granted that's a generation or 2 ago

Anyway, I've always been of the belief that performance (of a laptop) is more heavily limited by things like memory speed/bandwidth hard drive speeds etc than pure CPU grunt.
Most laptops are likely to have poor memory bandwidth and slow drives (5400 rpm mechanical for example) compared to even the base level pcs.
Look at true gamers benchmarks - those show clearly mobile kit isn't that far behind when it's packaged properly.

It is true that people shouldn't just look at numbers (I.e bigger is better) but this can also apply to desktops too - a great spec of with crippled memory and disk speeds will be overall slower than a more balanced machine.

 

Half the people on this thread really seem to be missing the point of the article. The article and comments here are not saying that you can't get good performance from a laptop. It is stating that CPUs for Laptops are not up to the same level as their NAMED counterparts in the Desktop market. It is rather pointless to argue a point about CPU performance by stating gaming performance from high end mobile GPUs.

 

NO. But you keep on believing that.

 

Bit-Tech, just a small question but why does the blog section have a different comment style (continuous) rather than the same as articles (paged)?

 

I thought what the article was getting at was common sense. Even to non pc enthusiasts, most people I've dealt with understand a laptop has subpar performance to that of an 'equivalent' pc.

 

Except it then goes on to use the top of the range desktop cpu and a bottom end mobile cpu in the comparison.

 

I would have actually been interested in this but one benchmark seems completely worthless

Sent from my GT-I9505 using Tapatalk 2

 

What are you talking about? The graph compares a range of CPUs from high end to a £90 i3 CPU that is also quoted as being faster in the test than the Laptop CPU which is a Quad i7, and you call that a bottom end Laptop CPU?

 

As far as quad core ivybridge i7s go, yes the 3630 is no where near the top end, it's basically one step up from my bottom of the range 3610.

 

This is a very confusing and somewhat pointless "article / blog post or whatever".

All this "test" proves is that a laptop i7 Quad core CPU - clocked about the same as a dual core i3 with the same architecture - performs about the same in a test that doesn't utilise multiple cores/threads - the 2600K is slower than the 2500K.....

Also which CPU is actually being tested? 3610QM or 3630QM?

Note:
3610QM - 2.3-3.3Ghz
3630QM - 2.4-3.4Ghz

i3 3220 - 3.3Ghz

How about putting the laptop CPU through a test that will actually utilise all of the 8 threads the 3610QM has?

Considering the power envelopes involved the SB and on generation of mobile CPU's are extremely good. Middle level mobile quads (3720QM etc) will be virtually indistinguishable from their desktop counterparts in real world testing. The only thing they lose is overclocking potential (somewhat fixed by the QXM model).

 

I honestly don't know. It was designed long before I took over. I think the narrow width is to make the page look better when posting short blog posts. Not sure about the endless comments, though.

 

You should really have used an i7-3740QM as that's the sort of cpu you'd get in that priced laptop these days - that's got a base clock at 2.7Ghz.

 

I've been thinking this since the first few confused comments appeared. With identical clock speeds, number of threads and architecture then the difference between a desktop and mobile CPU will be negligible.

I read the point of the article as suggesting that high end laptop CPUs are essentially lower voltage/clock speed variants of mid range desktop parts, and so on down the scale.

They cost more because they have to be engineered more carefully to allow for suitable power consumption, but nobody is suggesting anywhere that desktop CPUs are better than mobile ones. They are just cheaper for the equivalent performance.

There is no way you could cram an i7-3970X into a laptop form factor, so it's understandable that Intel had to re-jig the part numbers for mobile otherwise they would not have been able to offer high end parts by name.

 

Re mobile gaming, since I had kids (yeah, I know), most of my gaming has been done on the train or during lunchtime. As a result I've played many hours on my i3 Lenovo X121e and I have to say that it's coped admirably. It handled the new Xcom well, it's absolutely fine with all of the older Total War games and I recently got through Stalker (Complete) without any worries about performance. I think you just have to be realistic - I wouldn't try to play Battlefield 3 on my lappy, but for older or slower paced games it's amazingly good.

 

Also what people don't realise, a laptop CPU will only boost on one core. So when it says turbo frequency of upto 3.8GHz etc, it is only on one core.

Only on laptops that allow you to overclock the CPU, can you set every core to boost at those frequency's.

My old 3720QM had a boost of upto 3.6GHz - (On one core) But because Intel lock the CPU's multi on the non XM editions, I could only max that CPU out at 3.8GHz on all cores. The 3920XM was completely unlocked, so you could try any clock speed, if your cooling was up to it.
The other problem with overclocking on laptops, is not having advance setting to adjust the vcore, etc. So you are very limited.
My 3920XM would boot at 4.5GHz, but because I had no control over the vcore, I could only use the basic settings, which limited the vcore to 1.34v, so 4.2GHz was the max stable overclock I could get, which to be fair, 4.2GHz on all 8 threads out of a laptop, and on a 330W PSU, with 2 power hungry HD7970M, just goes to show how optimal and efficient laptops really are.

 

i7-3740QM which is the cpu they should have tested with (as it's a relatively inexpensive i7) has a base clock of 2.7, can boost all 4 cores to 3.5, 2 cores to 3.6 and 1 core to 3.7. It has a cpu mark of 8558 (desktop i7-3770K is only 9609).

Basically it's as close as doesn't matter to any non oc desktop i7. Hence blog above is basically wrong - the desktop chips are only really faster if you over clock.

 

What i hate is when someone tells me that their phone is as fast as a computer...

 

Yes, the mobile CPU naming is deliberately misleading. An i5 mobile cpu laptop for below £500 and people might think they're getting something similar to a desktop i5. I dislike laptops quite a bit actually. My iPad 4th gen runs games better than a £500 laptop.

 

on the intel side its quite hard to buy an slow laptop unless you buy a AMD laptop as unlike Intel, AMD allow an low end netbook CPUs into an full size laptops (the amd C G Z E E2 so on type CPUs) whereas Intel do not (ATOM CPUs)

even a celeron intel CPU is just an cut down sandy bridge cpu now, so its fast enough for basicly most tasks

most AMD based low end laptops seem to use the AMD E (bobcat) type CPUs they are a utter fail of an CPU to use and are on par/worse than a intel ATOM CPU, they are far slower then an core2duo so in most cases they are upgrading from an old laptop to an new laptop that is slower than their old laptop (as 5 of my customers have found out only 2 could take them back as they had them for more then 14/30 days)

 

I love my E450 laptop. More than enough grunt for what I want to use an 11'' laptop for (writing, browsing, note taking etc) plus 8-10 hour battery life.

Its much quicker than all but the latest gen atom, by the way. The gpu helps!