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Comment by bhouston | Hacker News Reader

According to PassMark, a CPU benchmarking website, the Intel Core i7 5557U isn't that fast:

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-5557U...

Now it only has a single sample, but a rating of ~5000 is a third of the performance rating of a top of the line Core i7 5960, which comes in at 15969:

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-5960X...

This is not what one considers a powerful CPU.

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I miss the MHz wars. Yes, the MHz number was never a great measure of CPU performance but at least it meant something. i3, i5 and i7 mean whatever Intel wants them to. The are also trademarked, so even if AMD has something equivalent to an i5 it is not obvious to consumers.

Of course pushing the clocking past 3 MHz didn't make sense technically, and we are not going back there. It just shows the power of a single number for consumers to compare.

That turbo button was an oddity of the times and I'm glD we don't need anything like that now.

The first version - used to slow your machine down so that software (mostly games) didn't run too fast - was bad enough but the later version - which did nothing but light an LED or change some numbers on some 7segment displays - was a really weird decision.

It's tempting to recreate this as an app. Clearly label t as a joke but see if any reviewers claim it works.

It's a U-series CULV CPU. Intel's mainstream chip series have actually been going down in performance, as Intel tries to "recuperate" large gains in power consumption levels against ARM in big gulps with each generation (it can't do that just from new nodes and IPC optimizations, so it also lowers default clock speeds).

Now Intel is pushing even lower-performance chips than the U-series (the Y-series/Core M) for the mainstream, and as we've seen even Apple is going for that in the new Macbook Air.

I wonder if they won't be pushing a 500 MHz (base speed) 3W TDP "Z-series" in a couple of years for most mainstream notebooks (while still charging ~$150-$200 per chip).

The Macbook Air still uses an i5 (or i7 in the expensive model), though it's now a Broadwell one. The new ultra-thin Macbook uses a Core M, but is not an Air.

This trend is incredibly frustrating. I've been looking for a new laptop to replace a ~3 year old ultrabook and I'm actually finding that anything in a similar or smaller form factor actually has worse performance than my current laptop. It's hard to convince yourself to spend $1000 on something which brings no tangible improvement over what you already have (if my current laptop wasn't physically wearing out I'd almost certainly not replace it).

Well, the benefit here would be battery life considering the chipset uses less power. Not too long about we were buying ~5-6lbs Dells and HPs that maybe got 90 minutes of heavy use or 120 minutes of light use. Now multi-hour life is the norm on a form factor that weighs almost half that.

Performance, depending on your needs, is probably not CPU bound. My biggest performance upgrade was installing SSDs into all my equipment. Turns out I've been disk-bound this entire time. The CPU just sits there waiting for disk data. Even with super-fast SSDs most people aren't CPU bound. Now they're network bound (why isn't this webpage loading fast enough?).

Those are multiplied by the number of cores. This one only has 2 I think. The top one has 6 cores. The CPUs in the first link that are faster are laptop CPUs with 4 cores. So per core this one is much faster than the other ones. Also has a good amount of L3 cache per core.

The main problem here (imo) is the RAM, because you can't go past 16gb.

Not just RAM but also TDP - 28W for that form factor is a bit too much. Current i5 NUC IMO hits the sweet spot - it's pretty powerful and can be made silent with the stock fan. I hope in the future Intel can squeeze i7-U into a Baytrail power envelope ;-)

What do you mean by 'can be made silent'?

If you set fan RPMs to ~25% in the BIOS it becomes silent (at least NUC5i5RYH). I use it for distraction-free Linux-based development that way.

Passmark has, in my experience, been an excellent benchmark for predicting parallel compile times. They proved to be an almost perfectly linear predictor for instance for Android AOSP build times on various systems of mine.

Haswell and now Broadwell i7-*U are ridiculously slow, and I feel it's silly to label them as an i7. They are high end mostly because of marketing, not real-life CPU performance.

5000 was pretty good 6 years ago: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7+860+%4...

The TDP is much lower on the 5557U though, at 28W vs 140W for the 5960X and 95W for the 860. Thus, the 5557U is not a leader in raw speed but several times more power-efficient.

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