Pentium N3700?

[JJ Johnson]

I came across this CPU looking at lower priced laptop. What exactly is a "Pentium" these days and how might this CPU compare to a 2 core i3 or a 4 core i5?

 

[toast0]

I came across this CPU looking at lower priced laptop. What exactly is a "Pentium" these days and how might this CPU compare to a 2 core i3 or a 5 core i5?

Pentium, i3, and i5 are whatever they decide to slap the label on.It's always a good idea to look up the processor on ARK to see what it is. The type of core makes more difference than the label they attach; this one is a Braswell (Atom SoC), so it's got less IPC than a contemporary mainstream core (Broadwell); but it runs cooler, and a similar price, similar clockrate Broadwell has half the cores. Braswell has a lot more components integrated, so you can have a smaller motherboard etc.

 

[Rav3n]

I came across this CPU looking at lower priced laptop. What exactly is a "Pentium" these days and how might this CPU compare to a 2 core i3 or a 4 core i5?

Intels new branding for Atom CPU's and chipsets. Not the equivalent of the Pentium from a few years ago which was a cut down i3.

 

[defaultluser]

Intels new branding for Atom CPU's and chipsets. Not the equivalent of the Pentium from a few years ago which was a cut down i3.

Mind you, those Pentiums and Celerons still exist. These are just filling-out the lowest-end price bracket, replacing the toxic Atom name with something really confusing.

Simple filter: if it has an N or a Z in the name, it's an Atom for sure.

 

[Rav3n]

Mind you, those Pentiums and Celerons still exist. These are just filling-out the lowest-end price bracket, replacing the toxic Atom name with something really confusing.

Simple filter: if it has an N or a Z in the name, it's an Atom for sure.

Exactly. Kind of a dirty move on the part of Intel. Because you can still find variants of the cut down i3, also branded as Pentium.

 

[FnordMan]

Intels new branding for Atom CPU's and chipsets. Not the equivalent of the Pentium from a few years ago which was a cut down i3.

Still a reasonably good processor though I wouldn't throw heavy tasks at it.

I've got one of those in my HTPC, works quite well for video playback, the thing doesn't even need a fan in there.

 

[PGHammer]

Still a reasonably good processor though I wouldn't throw heavy tasks at it.

I've got one of those in my HTPC, works quite well for video playback, the thing doesn't even need a fan in there.

By "heavy", you must mean core-intensive tasks.

If you are talking about tasks that are NOT very core-intensive (which includes a lot of games, oddly), as long as you have at least 8GB of decent desktop RAM and a solid discrete GPU, you aren't going to be hobbled by even the nerfed i3 that is the Pentium-G (especially G3258 or G3260) - not even compared to a real i3. (Out of the 83 processes I currently have running, fifty-two (greater than half) are background processes, and my CPU utilization is typically all of three percent. The threads are 1290+ (up to 1300) and over 37,000 handles. Efficiency, efficiency, efficiency. As long as we're not talking DX12-based gaming (such as Ashes of the Singularity) and you have a decent DX11 GPU (it doesn't HAVE to be Kepler - my GTX550Ti - which is carryover - is Fermi-based), you can do things you can't do with even a quad-core of the Qxxxx sort (such as streaming) thanks to QuickSync (couldn't stream with a Q6600, but can do easily with G3258). And if you run into a task that IS core-intensive, you can always swap in an i5 without changing anything else.