Thinkpads Forum

when comparing the intel core i7 2620m to the core i5 2540m processors, I was wondering what contexts would demand the additional performance of the 2620m? Essentially, with the i7 you get 1mhz faster clock rate and 1mg addition cache.

In what contexts does having this bit extra translate in a performance boost? Would you see a little boost in Gaming? ripping mp3s?

What folks purchase this processor over the other and why do they select it?

i5 = gaming mostly
i7 = video encoding, and other apps that are multithreaded (i.e. benifits from the Hyper Threading)

when doing your own research, the same chips in a more talked about desktop platform are i5 2500K and i7 2600K

see this post elsewhere: http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/824 ... s-i7-2600k

thanks for this link.

With the mobile processors though, both the i5 and i7 are multi-threaded. the only differences are cache and clock rate. I'm mostly interested in what the extra cache would benefit?

heh, this user made the same mistake i did... assumed the mobiles mirrored the desktops...

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=43&t=96158

As far as the extra cache (and another tidbit if you mean in the x220):

FragrantHead wrote:I suppose you already know the i7 version also comes with a USB3 port [referring to the x220 in the thread]. I'm buying it, because I keep machines a long time and will probably want USB3 down the line. You probably also know the i5 and i7 are identical, except for a slight bump in clock speed and 1MB extra cache on the i7. It's applications that benefit from the extra cache that may show a noticeable performance increase, I would say. Unfortunately I don't use AutoCAD, so can't add anything more useful.

Other apps that would benifit would be like database apps... where the size of the database would fit in the cache (searchs would be much faster)...

or like SETI@home... where the size of the program fits into cache:

http://www.myurl.net/seti/tips.htm wrote: GUI Client Speedup Tips for Windows 95/98/NT/ME/2000/2003

Overview: The SETI@Home client program will run as fast as possible if it can stay in L2 Cache without any competition from other programs so do the following:

I wouldn't expect games, compression, transcoding type apps to benifit as much if at all... then ecoding a video, all the data is new and the source is much bigger then any cache and probably not read into memory in the 1st place.

image editing prolly not either... an image from my Canon PowerShot A470 7.1 MP @ 3072x2034@72dpi uses 18M memory... so image manipulation has to be read from main memory.