The Intel Pentium Gold 6500Y is an efficient dual-core SoC for tablets and passively cooled notebooks based on the old Amber Lake generation from 2018.
You can tell the generation by the four-digit number: 7000’s are 7th-Gen 8000’s are 8th-Gen, etc.Intel Pentium Gold 6500Y ► remove from comparison This is to say, each generation of the Core-series CPUs have their own i3, i5, i7, and i9 versions. Even so, the 8th-Gen and 9th-Gen architectures are quite close– close enough that they support the same socket and motherboards, though older MBs will require a BIOs update. The 8100 is actually an 8th-Gen chip, but no 9th-Gen i3s actually exist yet. ( Z390 mobos are recommended for overclocking, though). Most of the processors we’ve listed below are using Intel’s latest 9th-Gen architecture, and are compatible with all Intel 300-Series motherboards. This means that their cores are also fundamentally identical– it’s just that the 9900K has much more of them, and hyper-threading enabled on top of that.
Fundamentally speaking, the i5-9600K and i9-9900K are using the exact same architecture. Last but not least, let’s talk architecture!Īrchitecture will generally be the biggest determiner of how your CPU will perform. We recommend using tools like UserBenchmark for that instead. Comparing against CPUs from different generations or different brands doesn’t quite work. In layperson’s terms, while the CPUs might move at the same speed, they are moving more info at any given time.Īs such, clock speed and core count should generally only be used to compare performance across processors that share the same architecture. That’s because of changes to their architecture, rather than boosts in raw clock speed and core count. Once we hit 3+ GHz as a commonplace standard over a decade ago, progress on that front has slowed down.īut processors have gotten pretty fast, too. While we are starting to see some higher clocks push 4 and 5 GHz on consumer processors, this has only started happening in the past few years. Here’s a twist, though: Clock speeds…haven’t changed that much in the past decade. It’s also worth noting that not all processors can overclock, only the ones with -K at the end can… you’ll also need a compatible motherboard. This is recommended only for enthusiasts, though, as it can result in overheating and instability (and then a bunch of troubleshooting) if you don’t manage it properly. Some processors may also support overclocking, which allows the user to increase clock speed themselves. Or, at least, the top speed– clock speed will often dynamically reduce when the system gets too hot, or the higher speeds simply aren’t needed (ie during common desktop tasks). Short version: it measures the speed, in Gigahertz, of your processor cores.
These are tasks that have heavy CPU requirements and benefit greatly from powerful, multi-threaded processors.Ĭlock speed is one of the most-marketed specs in a processor, but… what does it actually mean? The main reason to get a processor with more cores or threads today is for purposes like live-streaming your gameplay or rendering video. Very few modern games can meaningfully utilize more than that, though as time goes on, that will likely change. In gaming terms, you generally don’t need any more than 4 strong cores for acceptable gaming performance. This usually happens without any meaningful loss in performance, and so it effectively doubles the processor’s power… at least when used in applications optimized to utilize multiple threads. With SMT (called Hyperthreading (HT) by Intel) enabled, there can now be two virtual threads per physical core. With the debut of SMT (Simultaneous Multithreading) technology, however, a distinction arose. In the past, threads and cores were completely 1:1 in any given system, so the distinction between the two didn’t matter much. A thread is essentially a virtual core, or how the operating system sees your physical core.