Wolfdale Core 2 Duos performance vs laptop i5 2400 family

[garaujo]

Hi everyone,



I have noticed that i5 sandybridge releases for laptops are all dual-core ( with hyper-threading ), they fall around 2.5 Ghz clockspeed. Having used Wolfdale processors for quite some time e5300 to e8400 [ 3.0 Ghz ], i was not particularly satisfied with it's multi-tasking performance.


That being the case, should I expect better performance from the laptop i5's than the old Wolfdale's ? [ In particular, perhaps someone may know from firsthand experience how an i5 2410m performs compared to an e8400, assuming both have same gpu, at 4 Gb RAM ]



Thanks,

 

[jaguarskx]

Generally speaking, the 2nd generation Core i CPUs are about 22% - 25% faster than than a 2nd generation Core 2 Duo CPU at the same clock speed.

The Core i5-2410M has a clock speed of 2.3GHz. Turbo Boost can increase it to 2.9GHz when only one core is being stressed. That decreases to 2.6Hz if both cores are being stressed either with two single threaded applications running at the same time or a single multi-threaded application is running.

A Core i5-2410 2.3GHz would be roughly equivalent to an Core 2 Duo mobile CPU at 2.8GHz at standard speed. When Turbo Boosted to 2.6GHz, that works out to about a Core 2 Duo clocked at 3.2GHz.

The Hyper Threading (HT) capabilities of the Core i5-2410 can improve overall performance if the program(s) used are designed to take advantage of HT. Games do not use HT. Typically the only types of programs that can use HT which are used by average consumers are compression programs like WinRAR and 7-Zip, and video encoding programs like Handbrake. There would also be some background processes in Windows that can take advantage of HT.

There are also some anti-virus programs that can take advantage of HF; like Avira; but performance is generally limited by the speed of the hard drive when performing a system scan.

 

[garaujo]

Best answer selected by garaujo.