Before purchasing a laptop, there are several features you look out for that will suit your need. The Central Processing Unit (CPU) is one of the major components you should look out for if you want to get value for the money you'd spend. Before deciding on which CPU would be needed, most people go by price only. There are other little technical things you need to know aside price of CPU before purchasing that laptop.
The most common CPU in the market is the Intel® CPU. The close competitor is AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) but I want to show you how to read the meaning of Intel CPU model number so that you can determine which one to settle for.
The most common Intel CPU brands are grouped into Celeron™, Pentium™ and Core ™. The other one not very common is Xeon™.
🛑 Celerons are the least powerful and they are meant for menial office works like typing and data entry. They can hardly be used for editing pictures. They will do but it'll be very slow. Going with price, they cost the least among others.
🛑 Pentiums are a bit faster and efficient than Celeron in the same generation. (We shall consider meaning of CPU generation in a while). They can handle very mild gaming to some extent. Going with price, they are costlier than Celerons in the same generation, most times.
Intel Core has four brand modifiers and they are i3, i5, i7 & i9.
🛑 i3s are the least in the cores and they can be used for day to day office work, coding with a little longer compilation time, browsing, audio and mild video editing with much longer rendering time. They are for people who don't do much multitasking. They cost lesser than other Intel cores.
🛑 i5s They are good for multitasking, gaming, video editing, can run some scientific simulation software with proper settings but can't handle 3D rendering very well especially if there isn't a dedicated Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). They are quite more expensive than i3s.
🛑 i7s They are mainly used for gaming, heavy video editing, 3D rendering and also run scientific simulation software well. They can do what i5s would do but more efficiently and faster.
🛑 i9s They are high end CPU beasts for crunching very huge tasks quickly due to their more number of cores, cache and higher clock speed than i7s. They are the most expensive in the core family.
If you check a typical Intel CPU, you would most likely see something like Intel Core i5 10210U, for example. We've considered what the brand names and brand modifier are.
The next thing to look out for is the Generation Indicator, SKU Numeric Digits and Product Line Suffix.
🛑 Generation: The first figure after the brand modifier indicates the generation of the CPU. Newer generations of CPU are usually faster then older generations, but not in all cases.
For example, a 9th generation core i5 would/can be faster than a 12th generation Celeron. But a 12th generation core i5 would/can be faster than 9th generation core i7.
The reason for those differences is that as generation advances, technology would be improving and more cores would be added to the CPU. They would have higher clock speed, they would be more efficient, higher TDP (Thermal Design Power, that would sometimes make the CPU overclockable{to increase its clock speed} and therefore emitting more heat), etc
At the time of this writing, September 2022, Intel CPU is at its 12th generation.
So it is advisable that a prospective buyer should be aiming towards buying at least 8th generation to get good value out of it.
There are still 3rd-7th generation Intel CPU in the market but keep in mind that application software are updated frequently and the software developers are always updating those software to run on modern CPU. So don't be surprised to notice that a software that runs efficiently on a laptop with a, say 6th generation CPU, will begin to hang and fail when the software is updated.
That is a very good fact to keep in mind. As hardware technology is advancing, software technology would be updated to run on the modern hardware and therefore leaving behind old hardware to pieces of scrap. That is why many people don't want to update old programs they use on their old systems.
Read also: How To Monitor Your Laptop Battery Health
🛑 SKU Numeric Digits: This digit is used to determine which CPU with the same brand modifier and generation indicator will perform faster and efficiently.
Let's take three CPUs with model number Core i5 8250U, Core i5 8265U, Core i5 8365U as example. Considering the first point, you'll see that those CPU model listed are all 8th generation of the i5 core series.
The one with SKU number 265 will be faster and have more features than that with 250. The one with SKU number 365 will be faster and have more features than that of 265. It's as simple as that.
In essence SKU number is used to determine the difference in performance of different CPUs in the same generation and the same brand modifier. CPU with higher number will have more features.
Read also: Computer Storage Optimazation
🛑 Product Line Suffix: You need to pay attention to this because it determines performance, power consumption, overclocking capabilities and availability of integrated graphics card.
Here is a list to help you easily know what Product Line Suffix means:
CPsU with suffix H have High Performance Graphics, they are used in laptops and consume much power.
CPUs with suffix HK are found in high-end laptops and can be overclocked to increase its speed. They also consume much power.
CPUs with suffix X are High-end Unlocked Processors that can be overclocked with the most cores and highest price.
CPUs with suffix HQ are Quad-core (four cores) Processors optimized for high performance and they are found in very expensive laptops.
CPUs with suffix K are Unlocked Processors which means they can be overclocked to increase speed.
CPUs with suffix S are Special Edition Processors. Not much is said about this.
CPUs with suffix R and C are soldered-on and Unlocked desktop processor. R stands for High-end Mobile, similar to H and C stands for unlocked, similar to K.
They are soldered to the motherboard and can't be removed for replacement or upgrade.
CPUs with suffix U are Power-efficient Processors used in laptops. They consume less power, they have good integrated graphics card, they are efficient and they are less expensive.
From what I see around, they are the most common laptop processors due to their all round feature suitable for a power-efficient laptop.
CPUs with suffix T are Moderately power-optimized Processors used in laptops. They use less power than the CPUs with U suffix.
CPUs with suffix Y are Extremely Low Powered Processors used in laptops. They use low power than the CPUs with T suffix.
CPUs with suffix G are Desktop Processors including discrete or integrated graphics
The G CPUs feature Radeon RX Vega graphics built from AMD (Advanced Micro Devices)
CPUs with suffix F are Desktop Processors excluding discrete/integrated graphics. They don't have graphics card.
CPUs with suffix E are Embedded Processors meaning they can be used in embedded systems.
CPUs with suffix G1-G7 have Graphics performance starting from 10th Generation Processors. They are graphics oriented CPUs.
Higher figure like G7 has higher graphics capacity than G3, for example. G7 is the highest in rank while G1 is the least.
I hope this blog has given a clue on how to determine the type of CPU in your PC and the type you should look out for in that new PC you're planning to purchase.
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