Still confused about i5 vs i7

My understanding is that i7 is better than i5 primary for multi-threading. Therefore, a 4th gen i5 and a 4th gen i7 with similar clock speeds would produce similar performance, if only 1 thread was used (with no hyperthreading).

If I rarely use multiple threads, does that mean that a i5 4300m (2.6 GHz) is faster than a i7 4500u (1.8 GHz)?

 

Probably. You have to look at the TDP as well to see if the chip is designed for sustained load at the max clock (not the base clock), since it will turbo boost for the single thread.


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Also u processors are low voltage and typically incapable of sustaining high frequencies, due to heat.


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The i5 is quite a bit faster. The i7 in this case is not a real i7 like what I have, it's a gimped ULV dual-core w/HT chip that's gonna be TDP-limited in a lot of usage scenarios and fail to Turbo Boost.

 

both the cpu you mentioned are 2 cores 4 threads
so the "i7" will not perform significantly better in multi-threading workload
perhaps the i5 will even outperform the i7 because the i7 is a low power model for very portable machines, the i5 has a higher clockspeed
a real i7 with 4 cores 8 threads will certainly perform better in this case

 

With U and Y the i5 vs i7 nomenclature is ambiguous. They are the same chips, just i7 clocks a bit faster. At least with full voltage CPU's an i5-4xxxM is dual core + hyperthreading, i7-4xxxxMQ/X is quad core + hyperthreading.

Desktops too, are fairly well defined. i3 is dual core + hyperthreading, no boost, i5 is four cores with no hyper threading but has boost, i7 is all of four cores plus hyperthreading plus boost.