How fast does turbo boost kick in?

Bruno Vincent · Jan 3, 2018

I have an old laptop with a Pentium B950, it runs at 2.1 GZ at all time when plugged in pretty much.

I want to get a laptop with an i5-8250u but I wonder if it might be slower in some cases....

The i5-8250u has 1.6 GZ base...can turbo boost to 3.4 yes, but doesn't that take time to kick in? Like in cars?

I mean let's say I have 2 tasks to do, for example, open Adobe Illustrator.

The old CPU is already at 2.1, but new one is at 1.6

Will the old laptop start up AI faster cause it's already at 2.1 an new one would take time to get to 3.4?

Additionally, if the old PC has base of 2.1 will it be faster for day to day stuff than 1.6 base clock?

Someone Somewhere · Jan 3, 2018

For starters, there's six generations between them. Architecture alone is likely to mean that 1.6GHz on the new chip is equivalent to or better than 2.1GHz on the old chip, per core.

The new chip is a quad core, not a dual core.

Turbo boost is, I believe, sub-millisecond. Certainly sub-second.

This is before you consider stuff like hyper-threading, a newer platform with faster memory, and that your new PC will almost certainly have an SSD whereas the old almost certainly won't.

Bruno Vincent · Jan 3, 2018

Someone Somewhere :

Bruno Vincent · Jan 3, 2018

Old one has ssd, and I also have a desktop i5-8400 with 16 gigs of ram, I switch the ssd back and forth between the desktop and old laptop.

And to be honest...desktop ain't much faster unless I open like 200 tabs...

So I really wonder if this is all hype and an older 2.1 might be faster than newer base clock 1.6 ?

cryoburner · Jan 3, 2018

Just like Someone Somewhere said, the processor speed can change almost instantaneously as needed, and since the instructions per clock have also increased with each processor generation, even when at 1.6GHz the 8250u is likely just as fast or faster than the B950 at 2.1GHz, even before we get into the higher boost clocks and additional threads it can handle.

These benchmarks at Userbench should be indicative of the kind of performance difference there is between the two processors. Even comparing just single-threaded performance, the benchmarks show the 8250U as having roughly double the performance...

http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Pentium-B950-vs-Intel-Core-i5-8250U/m1968vsm338266

Of course, that won't necessarily translate into all things running faster, as other hardware like storage can limit the performance of application load times and such, but as far as the CPU itself is concerned, the 8250u should almost certainly be as fast or faster than the B950 in any scenario.

Bruno Vincent · Jan 3, 2018

What about the i7 7500?

It has a base clock of 2.7 and turbo of 3.5 , while the i5-8350u has base clock of 1.6 and turbo 3.4, so BOTH lower than i7 7500, yet faster 40% on benchmarks...?

Is the i5-8250u really fast as they say it is? Or only synthetic benchmarks?

What I'm looking for is snappy performance, not for gaming or theoretical speed, would I be better off with an i7 7500 or i5 7300hq?

cryoburner · Jan 4, 2018

I wrote this response yesterday, but the site went under maintenance, so I couldn't post it then. : /

If you're referring to the 7500u, that processor only has 2 cores with 4 threads, while the 8250u has 4 cores with 8 threads, so in a benchmark that made full use of all cores at once, the 8250u would likely be a decent amount faster.

However, most of today's software doesn't make heavy use of that many cores at once. Those two CPUs should offer a similar amount of performance per-core, so in most applications, there wouldn't likely be a very noticeable difference between the two, unless perhaps you were heavily multitasking with a number of applications running, or using software that can make use of those extra cores like certain video encoders.

The 7300hq has 4 cores with 4 threads, and again, would likely perform pretty similar to those other processors in most applications. In more heavily threaded ones, it should perform relatively similar to the 8250u, and both of those would be faster than the 7500u in those cases.

The naming of these laptop processors can be kind of weird, in that bigger number don't always equal more performance. The letter at the end indicates whether the CPU features such things as "ultra-low power" (U) or "high performance graphics, quad-core" (HQ). That's why a 7300hq might perform better than a 7500u. The 7500u is geared toward laptops with ultra-low power use, while the 7300 is less energy efficient, but performs a bit better. A laptop containing the 7500u might be thinner, lighter, and get better battery run-time than one with the HQ parts though.

It's also worth noting that even with a particular processor, performance can potentially vary from one model of laptop to another. A particular "thin and light" laptop might be less prone to boost as often as a larger model with better cooling, for example. It might be worth looking up professional reviews of the laptops you are looking at, if any are available.

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