i9 Cores in Laptops, think it's worth it?

[Graybush]

This questions actually came up at the Tom's Guide office!

Henry Casey, one of our writers, recently reviewed a Macbook Pro 15 (2018 model) that contains a Intel Core i9-8950HK CPU and 32GB of RAM. Their benchmarks tests show that this laptop was a good outlier in terms of performance compared to other laptops.

So I wanted to ask here: Do you think an i9 core is worth having in a laptop? Why or why not? Are there better cores to include in laptops? Let me know.

Henry's review: https://www.laptopmag.com/reviews/laptops/macbook-pro-15-inch

 

[TechyInAZ]

As long as the Core i9 is not in a thin and light like a macbook it'd be worth it. Especially for the top tier gaming notebooks with one or two GTX 1080s, you won't get anywhere close to a CPU bottleneck.

However, when the core i7 variant with the same amount of cores is $150 cheaper, that would probably be a better option for workloads that aren't single threaded.

 

[James Mason]

Apple could make a slightly beefier sized laptop to properly support chips of that strength if they wanted to. If you need power like that, and are a Mac user, you probably aren't doing a lot of traveling with your laptop.