I think I have given up on chip naming. I honestly can't tell anymore there are so many modifiers on the names these days. I assume 9 is better than 7 right? Right?
Oh, the number of times I’ve heard someone assume their five- or ten-year-old machine must be powerful because it’s an i7… no, the i3-14100 (released two years ago) is uniformly significantly superior to the i7-9700 (released five years before that), and only falls behind the i9-9900 in multithreaded performance.
Within the same product family and generation, I expect 9 is better than 7, but honestly it wouldn’t surprise me to find counterexamples.
>>Within the same product family and generation, I expect 9 is better than 7
Ah the good old Dell laptop engineering, where the i9 is better on paper, but in reality it throttles within 5 seconds of starting any significant load and the cpu nerfs itself below even i5 performance. Classic Dell move.
Apple had the same problem before they launched the M1. Unless your workloads are extremely bursty the i9 MacBook is almost guaranteed to be slower than the base i7.
The latest iPhone base model performs better than the iPhone Air despite the latter having a Pro chip, because that Pro is so badly throttled due to the device form factor.
Are they throttling with the fan off? Because I don't recall ever hearing the fan on my M3 Max 14" (granted no heavy deliberate computational beyond regular dev work).
AFAIK it’s only something that happens under sustained heavy load. The 14” Max should still outperform the Pro for shorter tasks but I’d reckon few people buy the most expensive machine for such use cases.
Personally I think that Apple should not even be selling the 14” Max when it has this defect.
Within the same family and generation, I don’t think this should happen any more. But especially in the past, some laptops were configurable with processors of different generations or families (M, Q, QM, U, so many possibilities) so that the i7 option might have worse real-world performance than the i5 (due to more slower cores).
It's been a cooling problem on a lot of i9 laptops... the CPU will hit thermal peaks, then throttle down, this has an incredibly janky feel as a user... then it spins back up, and down... the performance curves just wacky in general.
Today is almost worse, as the thermal limits will be set entirely different between laptop vendors on the same chips, so you can't even have apples to apples performance expectations from different vendors.
Same for the later generation Intel Macbook Pros... The i9 was so bad, and the throttling made it practically unusable for me. If it weren't a work issued laptop, I'd have either returned it, or at least under-volted and under-clocked it so it didn't hiccup every time I did anything at all.
I had an X1 Carbon like this, only it'd crash for no apparent reason. The internet consensus that Lenovo wouldn't own up to was that the i7 CPUs were overpowered for the cooling, so your best bet is either underthrottling them or getting an i5.
Yeah, putting an i9 in any laptop that's not an XL gaming rig with big fans is very nearly always a waste of money (there might exist a few rare exceptions for some oddball workloads). Manufacturers selling i9s in thin & light laptops at an ultra price premium may fall just short of the legal definition of fraud but it's as unconscionable as snake-oil audiophile companies selling $500 USB cables.
Tbf 2 jobs ago I had a Dell enterprise workstation laptop, an absolute behemoth of a thing, it was like 3.5kg, it was the thicker variant of the two available with extra cooling, specifically sold to companies like ours needing that extra firepower, and it had a 20 core i9, 128GB of DDR5 CAMM ram, and a 3080Ti - I think the market price of that thing was around £14k, it was insane. And it had exactly that kind of behaviour I described - I would start compiling something in Visual Studio, I would briefly see all cores jump to 4GHz and then immediately throttle down to 1.2GHz, to a point where the entire laptop was unresponsive while the compilation was ongoing. It was a joke of a machine - I think that's more of a fraud than what you described, because companies like ours were literally buying hundreds of these from Dell and they were literally unsuitable for their advertised use.
(to add insult to the injury - that 3080Ti was literally pointless as the second you started playing any game the entire system would throttle so hard you had extreme stuttering in any game, it was like driving a lamborghini with a 5 second fuel reserve. And given that I worked at a games studio that was kinda an essential feature).
That's still assigning too much significance to the "i9" naming. Sometimes, the only difference between the i9 part and the top i7 part was something like 200MHz of single-core boost frequency, with the core counts and cache sizes and maximum power limit all being equal. So quite often, the i7 has stood to gain just as much from a higher-power form factor as the i9.
A machine learning model can place a CPU on the versioning manifold but I'm not confident that it could translate it to human speech in a way that was significantly more useful than what we have now.
At best, 14700KF-Intel+AMD might yield relevant results.
