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>Thin laptops are thermally throttled due to insufficient airflow Yes, the U-series intel i-X CPU's all do this. I have an old desktop w/ a 4th gen i3, and it

>Thin laptops are thermally throttled due to insufficient airflow Yes, the U-series intel i-X CPU's all do this. I have an old desktop w/ a 4th gen i3, and it performs better in benchmarks than new U-series i5 CPUs. And in practice outside of benchmarks, it feels significantly faster for have tons of tabs open, toggling between a few excel files with thousands of rows, data visualization (mostly Tableau) and gaming. Same with a 10yr old Xeon proc I had in an old desktop workstation at work compared to the 3yr old work laptop. A couple months ago I was due for a laptop upgrade and insisted they give me "anything but a U-series". They dug up a 9th gen H-series and they seemed to think the thing was worthless because it wasn't the latest gen. Meanwhile it had 32GB of RAM and a quatro 2000 GPU, so I jumped at it. I only get about 1.5 hours of batter in high performance mode, but it's fine. I'm not doing heavy loads in meetings so I just swap power profiles. In short, it's extremely likely that any mobile CPU is seriously underpowered compared to a desktop CPU from 6-10 years ago.

vladvasiliu 5y ago
Depending on what you do, you may be impressed with zen 3 u cpus. I was in the same boat, with an old 8-core Xeon something from like 2013 (it takes DDR3 RAM, and was one of the first to support PCIE 3). It was so fast, it ran circles around my current work computers (basic enterprise i5 HP). Then I insisted on a zen 3 laptop at the end of last year, and for rust compiles, it's almost twice as fast as the Xeon. It only has a 5650U (6 cores + HT), and a teeny-tiny heat sink. It does get somewhat noisy under load, but it's dead silent most of the time, including in Teams video chats!
- ineedasername 5y ago
  Good to know-- I'll consider AMD hardware the next time around. I have them in my primary home/gaming laptop, not a low power version though, and greatly prefer it to the 7th gen i7 I had previously. Both were about the same on single core (doesn't seem like there's been a lot of movement on that in recent years?) But the AMD is much better on anything multi core and seems to punch above it's weight class on GPU.

vladvasiliu 5y ago

Depending on what you do, you may be impressed with zen 3 u cpus. I was in the same boat, with an old 8-core Xeon something from like 2013 (it takes DDR3 RAM, and was one of the first to support PCIE 3). It was so fast, it ran circles around my current work computers (basic enterprise i5 HP). Then I insisted on a zen 3 laptop at the end of last year, and for rust compiles, it's almost twice as fast as the Xeon. It only has a 5650U (6 cores + HT), and a teeny-tiny heat sink. It does get somewhat noisy under load, but it's dead silent most of the time, including in Teams video chats!

ineedasername 5y ago
Good to know-- I'll consider AMD hardware the next time around. I have them in my primary home/gaming laptop, not a low power version though, and greatly prefer it to the 7th gen i7 I had previously. Both were about the same on single core (doesn't seem like there's been a lot of movement on that in recent years?) But the AMD is much better on anything multi core and seems to punch above it's weight class on GPU.