Intel Pentium N3540 quad or Core i5-4200U

I would be surprised if the Bay Trail chip can keep up with the Haswell chip.

But what do I know?
 
But since the quad has 4 cores at a max of 2,6ghz wouldn't it utilize it better at multitasking or even winrar unzipping?
 
So it appears intel is now marketing atom-derived parts under the pentium brand?!

Will the marketing madness ever stop getting worse?!
 
Nvidia101 said:
But since the quad has 4 cores at a max of 2,6ghz wouldn't it utilize it better at multitasking or even winrar unzipping?
Click to expand...

The cores are not equal. The N3540 uses Silvermont cores while the 4200u uses Haswell cores and the performance delta is rather large.

Looking at Notebookcheck the 4200u scores considerably higer than the N3540 over Cinebench Multithreaded and x264 benchmark, both would be a near ideal case for multi-core scaling. the 4200u is much faster in their Winrar bench as well.

The other thing is the IGP in the 4200u is both more advanced and powerful as well.

Results though shouldn't be very surpsing, the 4200u has a 15w official TDP budget and the N3540 has a 7.5w official TDP budget. Twice the power budget and a much more expensive chip.
 
Yes, the haswell is waaaaaaaay faster.

I5-4200 single threaded performance on cpubenchmark.net is ~ 1388, similar to a core i7-960
or xeon x5492 @3.4ghz (I believe these are core2 based)

The N3540 has a single threaded score of 524, similar to an amd sempron 3400+ or athlon64 2800+
 
plugwash said:
So it appears intel is now marketing atom-derived parts under the pentium brand?!

Will the marketing madness ever stop getting worse?!
Click to expand...

They have been doing this for a while. It started with some of the Celeron dual-core chips, if I recall correctly. There was a press release that I read somewhere that basically said that these chips offered Pentium-level performance, so they are being branded as Pentium chips. I want to get my hands on one to test drive it for a bit, but I really don't need one for any reason other than to satisfy my curiosity.

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Pentium-N3540-Notebook-Processor.117416.0.html
 
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Yeah, Bay Trail was "good enough" that they thought they could re-brand them as low-end Celeron and Pentium chips.

These chips are technically "good enough," with a massive improvement in single-threaded performance over the previous core, but it's still not as good as Haswell.

Quick summary:

If they are the same price, go with the i5. It's mountains faster, even if you won't always notice.

If the Pentium is significantly cheaper, and all you will be doing is browsing the web, you probably won't notice the performance difference. I'd say go with the cheaper option unless you will be gaming or doing more demanding office work.
 
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