CPU market

I am a computer hardware lover. I will make sure I am updated with all newest computer technologies and hardware releases. CPU is the first category of hardware that I paid attention to, from Pentium 1-4, all the way to duo-cores, quad-cores, and even to 8-cores.

However, understanding CPU requires a lot of contextual and background knowledge about hardware’ architectures and its corresponding performance testing platform. Most consumers are rather negligent about that and what they will do when they are buying laptops are either asking for help from the salesperson or consult friends who really know about computer hardware.

Taking the most recent example, Intel’s new generation of Mobile processors, the i-series, there are many models available on market each with slightly different architecture as well as the main clock speed measured in terms of frequency.

For Mobile i3 series, such as i3-330m (2.13GHz), i3-350m (2.26Ghz), i3-370m (2.4Ghz), and i3-380m (2.53Ghz), each of them appears to have faster speed in ascending order. There are many online hardware sites that consistently test the performance of each CPU model and they reflected about 5% performance increase with each model. This has found out to be a type of marketing strategies adopted by Intel for which Intel pay those websites for promoting their newest products by keeping the consumers informed. However, this also appears to be another marketing strategy for me as the laptop prices did not really change over the years, what changes is actually the model of CPU installed. Every 2 months or so, Intel will come up with a newer model with a higher speed frequency speed which kind of showed an improvement in the technology. However, most hardware lovers will know that it’s just a trick performed by Intel. The fundamental architecture of all i-3 series has not changed. In order words, what Intel did was just stabilizing and adjusting the clock speed slightly higher than before and declared them as if they were newer technology. Intel understands well that consumers wanted to buy things with newer technology and they wanted to see an improvement over time as compared to the older model.