Intel 3rd generation OR 4th generation!! Which laptop should be bought?

I noticed a question which is being asked by people, what is the difference between the Intel’s 3^rd and 4^th generation? Which laptop should they buy? The confusion is only because 4^th gen comes with less clock frequency then 3^rd and it is considered that more the GHz of the processor better they should perform as clock frequency is the main performance parameter.

  

Intel 4rd generation (Haswell) processor IVB-Die

The new technologies are being used to improve the performance besides the frequency such as multiple cores, SIMD, Instruction level parallelism. One of the main parameter is FLOPS (Floating Operations Per Second) is used to precisely measure the operational speed of the processor. Floating-point operations include any operations that involve fractional numbers. Such operations, which take much longer to compute than integer operations, occur often in some applications. 

The 4^th generation processors are based on the Haswell architecture which doubles the peak FLOPS compared to the 3^rd generation (Ivy Bridge architecture). The Haswell architecture also double the peak integer operations per second compared to 3rd generations. Thus, we can say a 4^th generation with 1.70 GHz can run with nearly same speed as 3^rd generation processor with 2.40 GHz.

It is also noticed that the TDP (Thermal Power Dissipation) in the 4^th gen processors are very less than compared to the 3^rd gen processors. Thus, they will consume less power than the 3^rd gen processors.

        

   

                      

                      

Thus, It is advised to buy a laptop with 4th generation instead of 3rd generation due to its key factor of less power consumption.

Author - Dharmendra Kumar

(Sr. Design Engineer at Silicon Mentor)