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| - Digital Trends |
Intel and AMD are the top processor manufacturer for desktops and laptops are releasing new generation processor after every few years. But their is a difference between desktops processors and laptop processors although they have almost identical names. I'm writing this article to explain you about why the performance gap in laptops compared to desktops.
Here we are considering Intel i7 CPU as they are widely preferred by manufactures in laptops. First we will differentiate the Desktop and Laptop(the official term preferred is Mobile but that doesn't mean smartphones in general) then we will do the reasoning part.
I hope you get the idea what the above table is trying to show. Here Intel's processor variants are shown depending on their Alpha Suffix, we are not considering clock-speed after the hyphen(-) as they are the overclocked speed and expect the Desktops and Gaming laptops that speed is barely reachable, also we're not considering the processor in yellow section.
As we go down the table the clocks speed and power are significantly reducing for laptops and notebooks. But why ?
Reason 1: Lower cooling efficiency
Technically we can say that laptops are the strip down version of desktops. As they have compact design and really slim designs like MacBooks to increase portability. For manufactures to achieve portability they have to let go one thing that is cooling variables in the system except the gaming laptops, as they have made the compromise with portability than cooling.
Due to low cooling efficiency in laptops manufactures reduce the base clock speed of the processor to maintain a tolerable temperature but if the temperature goes above that level the system has to slows down itself further more to increase the cooling efficiency, this is called as cpu throttling or the proper name i.e Dynamic frequency scaling to maintain a tolerable temperature.
Reason 2: Battery Life
Laptops performance is inversely proportional to it's battery life. The higher the performance the more power consumption, to counter this problem manufacturers have reduced the base clock speed. Reduction of clock speed results in reduction of performance i.e less power consumption and increase in battery life.
Why they do that? Simple answer is they want to sell the product, everything is advertised and it can be easily objected that's the reason laptop manufactures carefully reduce the clock speed to increase the battery life without affecting the sales.
That's it!
You can actually run a laptop at full clock speed but that will require external cooling like keeping it in the freezer and direct power connection but that's not portable.
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