7th, 8th, or 9th Gen Intel Chips: How to Choose Your Next Laptop?

Many users today wonder what is the best processor when choosing a high-performance laptop. In fact, it is worth getting lost in. The current situation is unprecedented: laptops based on Intel's 9th generation chips are sold alongside mobile PCs based on 8^th and even 7th generation CPUs. The likely reason? Faced with a lack of CPU supply linked to the famous Intel shortages, laptop manufacturers, rather than having no computers for sale, fell back on slightly older generations of processors. Except that these portable machines equipped with Intel processors of different “generations” are found simultaneously on the market and at a comparable price. A situation that is not very clear for the consumer.

Our colleagues at PCWorld have already compared, specification by specification, the 8th and 9th generation mobile processors from Intel. They also tested a number of portable machines running both generations of CPUs. This time, they compiled test results from 8th and 9th generation H-class laptops - the H indicating better performance - to have good benchmark data. They also included in their tests the 7th generation H processors. Although quite old, there are still stocks of 7th generation laptops on the shelves.

The most important now is the number of cores

In short, if you have to choose between different laptops running on chips with the same number of cores, for example a Core i7-8750H 6- cores and a 6-core Core i7-9750H CPU, no need to rack your brains. On the other hand, the performance will not be the same with a Core i9 CPU. Finally, when it comes to portable machines equipped with 10th Gen CPUs announced for later this year, while the new architecture brings notable improvements, our colleagues believe, based on very early preview benchmarks, that the improvement in the performance will be progressive.

MSI's GS65 Stealth Thin gaming laptop features a 9th Gen Core i7-9750H CPU and Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1660 Ti GPU. (Credit: Adam Patrick Murray)

Test Results

The test results presented here are almost exclusively CPU-focused, disregarding differences in storage, GPU, or RAM. The first test was performed with Maxon's Cinebench R15, a popular benchmark that measures CPU performance in rendering a 3D scene. This task is not for all use cases, but it gives a general idea of CPU performance in a highly efficient multithreading environment. In the table below, the newer 9th Gen CPU is shown in red, the previous 8th Gen CPU is shown in yellow, the even older 7th Gen CPU is shown in green. Finally, the desktop CPU, found in some laptops, appears in purple.

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Performance measurement in multi-core applications shows that laptops with 9th Gen (Red) 6-core chips generally perform well. These laptops are slightly faster than most 8th Gen (Yellow) laptops. Two portable machines equipped with 8th Gen chips do slightly better: these are 6-core, 17-inch Core i9 portable machines, with a thicker case. These results correspond to those obtained several months ago in the tests carried out by our colleagues when these machines were released: they concluded that with the 9th Gen 6-core CPUs, we could see a slight improvement in performance. , but it was insufficient and did not deserve to be overestimated. For multi-threaded tasks, the most interesting result concerns portable 7th Gen machines, in green, with 4-cores “only”. We can see on this graph that the difference in performance is significant.

In the graph above, the purple bars show the performance of laptops with 9th Gen CPUs, the orange bars show laptops with 8th Gen CPUs, and the green bars show laptops with 7th Gen CPUs. The yellow bars indicate the performance of laptops equipped with desktop CPUs. In blue, various machines. Click on the image to enlarge. (Credit: IDG)

Single-core performance also matters as it relates to web browsing, Office productivity, and even photo editing. For this, our colleagues again used the Cinebench R15 benchmark, but with a single-threaded or single-core CPU setting. Cinebench is a 3D rendering application which means that it does not necessarily translate what one could obtain with another task, but it still gives a very good approximation. The results are similar to those obtained in the previous test, but the gap has been closed. The main difference is related to the megahertz power of each portable machine. Generally speaking, it can be said that 9th Gen portable machines are slightly faster and 7th Gen portable machines perform slightly better. In short, if we stick to single-threaded tasks, even a 7th Gen CPU will do, and some newer chips won't do much.

The latest set of results measures how long it took each laptop to convert a 30GB video using the free HandBrake app. The more CPU cores, the better the application performs, but it can also use GPUs for encoding. However, for this test, only the CPU encoding was evaluated. Unlike Cinebench, which takes about a minute to run, encoding with HandBrake typically takes 30 minutes with a 6-core CPU. This extended operation identifies processors that are pushing performance to manage their thermal envelope. Three levels of performance stand out clearly: 8-core processors manage to complete their task in 23 minutes or less. Portable machines with 6-core CPUs accomplish the same task in about 30 minutes. Good last, laptops equipped with 4-core CPUs perform the encoding in about 45 minutes. If you are encoding a lot of video, you will need an 8-core 9th Gen CPU. To decide between these machines, there is no need to worry about the generation of the CPU. The main thing is to choose the machine according to the most important tasks that you want to perform.

On the other hand, portable 4-core machines are very penalizing in multi-core workloads. It's also worth bearing in mind that if the laptop was originally designed for traditional gaming, that level of performance is perfectly acceptable, but that doesn't mean it's best to stick with a gaming machine. generation while there are notebooks equipped with 8th or 9th Gen CPUs on the market.

Conclusion

Benchmarks show that in the case of Core i7 portable machines with 8th and 9th Gen CPUs, there are few differences. Performance differences are very minimal and depend more on cooling. The choice of graphics card, amount of RAM, SSD capacity or display will have more impact on performance. But, if you are looking for a machine offering the best multi-core performance, you should rather look at the 9th Gen Core i9 8-core laptops.