For laptops do 4 physical cores as opposed to 2 (with 2 logical cores each) make a big difference?

[thorcreator]

I have a small budget and trying to find a laptop for college/university with best specs possible, and I am aiming for something that's simply not slow and can handle multi-tasking. Now I have been told that Intel is often more reliable but the only processors for laptops with quad-core are the QM series which is only i7 and I couldn't find any laptop with such a processor. I have found laptops with AMDs that have 4 physical cores, but there are a lot of dual core i5/i7s that are deemed better by benchmarks like cpuboss. Then there is also processors like Intel Core M3-6Y30 which only have base clock speed of 0.9 GHz but cpuboss rates them as much better than an AMD with 4 cores and 2+ GHz each, how does that work?

I'm confused, what should I look for?

Kind Regards,
Monad

 

[_MasterG_]

Hey, what's your bugdet?

 

[KirbysHammer]

I have a small budget and trying to find a laptop for college/university with best specs possible, and I am aiming for something that's simply not slow and can handle multi-tasking. Now I have been told that Intel is often more reliable but the only processors for laptops with quad-core are the QM series which is only i7 and I couldn't find any laptop with such a processor. I have found laptops with AMDs that have 4 physical cores, but there are a lot of dual core i5/i7s that are deemed better by benchmarks like cpuboss. Then there is also processors like Intel Core M3-6Y30 which only have base clock speed of 0.9 GHz but cpuboss rates them as much better than an AMD with 4 cores and 2+ GHz each, how does that work?

I'm confused, what should I look for?

Kind Regards,
Monad

Currently in the mobile space-

Intel- QC always > than DC

AMD QC- slower than Intel's dual core but decent speed for browsing.

AMD DC- Avoid at all costs. These CPUS are going to struggle to do basically anything.

Why is the M3 faster than a QC AMD? Because the Intel has turbo boost, a higher IPC, and hyperthreading. IPC is instructions per clock, which is how much a CPU can get done per clock cycle. Hyperthreading allows you to squeeze more performance out of a core at the same clockspeed. This improvement is to the tune of 20% in multithreaded workloads and a loss of 1 to 2 percent in single threaded workloads due to overhead.