Brains, Brains, Brains....

Three new CPU prospects arrived in the post yesterday, all improvements on the Celeron 1020E that are in the batch of industrial computers I bought a little while ago. The overall idea is to always keep a todo list, something to do, to keep me busy, to keep me happy. In relation to other people's hobbies, this is a really cheap one and the three processors you see here cost me seventy dollars, true that is the cost of reasonable flat of beer nowadays, however, I like to think of my alcohol as more of an addiction, not a hobby, the hobby reduces the amount of time I spend thinking about the alcohol.

There are two i5-3320M 2.6GHz processors and an i5-3340M 2.7GHz unit. The designation of processors is quite the thing, breaking it down somewhat, the i5 means that they are all quad core compute units, four processing thingies. I have settled on this level of processor, they do a good job, they are priced well and inversely, are not the "best" thing, which the public desire. The next key thing is the "-3" which indicates a third generation Intel CPU of what, in the computing industry, is from the middle ages as they are up to the twelfth or higher generation today, however, I am shopping for improved brains for the Jetway motherboards, so these be those. 

The next three digits, the "320" and the "340" which are SKU designations, indicating that the higher number was developed later, in this case that makes sense as the first two run at 2.6GHz and the third at 2.7GHz, but fundamentally the same architecture. It is logical that the latter will be marginally faster, but in turn, it will probably run hotter, although all three have the same TDP of 35W. However, that is a convenient, rounded, number so the latter will run a little hotter.   

The last identifier "M" points to the segment of the market, in this case, mobile. This type of processor would have been commonly used in laptops back in the dark ages, in fact the laptop I use as my daily driver has an i5-3xxxM processor, and despite being sooooo old, works very well for what I need. These processors are a decade old, they are Intel Legacy Core, formerly Ivy Bridge, have 22nm lithography and many other descriptions that are really no longer important. 

A method of comparing a raw metric for processors is to search online for the benchmark, or passmark, a simple integer that represents relative performance. a search for "Celeron 1020E passmark" will result in several web sites that report various numbers, computing is always about the numbers...

The original processors, the Celeron 1020E data seems to be thin on the ground, but I discovered passmark numbers of 1394 and 1406 and when I searched for the i5-3340M there was a lot more data and that simple number was an average of 2667. In simple terms it appears that the replacement CPU will be about 90 percent faster.

As with most comparisons, that one number does not tell the entire story, but it is a quick method to form a relative performance judgement. Another metric is the single thread rating, because not all compute tasks are based on multiple threads, however, I'll leave that one for you to worry about. I will add though that the consumers have become rather obsessed with how fast their stuff is, so these numbers are very important for bragging rights, in fact it seems that, with processors and graphics cards, the boasting about the benchmark has become more important than actually doing anything productive on the computer.

There is a prospect of a much faster CPU at the weekend, but it is not in my grubby little hands yet, so I won't say anything more.