Or you can think of it as a 300 core CPU. GPUs are basically just hundreds of underpowered CPUs on the same die. Laptop CPUS often cannot be overclocked due to BIOS limitations. So if it can't play a game currently then you can, in many cases, overclock it until it does. An advantage of the intel K series is that they are unlocked and can easily be overclocked. Not every CPU can be over clocked, nor does every motherboard/BIOS support it. It's a common misconception that an i-whatever laptop is equal in power to i-whatever desktop.Įmulators generally only utilize 2 cores (sometimes 4), rarely more so having a hexa/octacore CPU, or one capable of hyperthreading, wont benefit you anymore than having a similar quadcore CPU.Įxcept for some more modern emulators like rpcs3 which currently can use 8 cores and maybe more in the future. For example, an i7 2-core laptop processor is most often weaker than a decent i3 desktop one. They may also have less cores than desktop processors with similar names.

Laptop CPUs are typically much weaker than their desktop variants due to being clocked lower, for battery and heat reasons. AMD will still perform fairly well, but will rarely perform equal to a similar generation Intel CPU at the same clock speed. Generally, Intel CPUs perform better than AMD CPUs for emulation in particular, due to their superior single core performance. Main reason for that is because Intel processors have higher performing floating-point units, and far greater cache/memory bandwidth/lower latency. This is true of many modern Intel vs AMD processors, as the high-end Intel processors are more efficient than the high-end AMD processors. Even though the Pentium D is clocked higher, the Core 2 Duo is faster due to the Core microarchitecture of the Core 2 Duo having so much higher instructions per clock than Netburst microarchitecture of the Pentium D that it can do more instructions per second despite having lower frequency. For example, a 2.4 GHz dual-core Intel Core 2 processor will generally outperform a 3.2 GHz dual-core Intel Pentium D processor. Newer CPUs generally perform better than older ones at similar clock speeds. Although clock speed is one of the main factors for good CPU performance, it is not the determining factor. Though the particular architechture does matter.A common misconception is that a higher CPU clock speed guarantees improved emulation performance.

Though 'i5' is quite vague, as that could be any of the generations or models, P4s are just that weak. For example, a 4GHz Pentium 4 is much, much less powerful than a 3GHz i5. in GHz) doesn't mean that it is powerful. Just because a CPU has a high clock speed (e.g.

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