Intel Core i5-10600 vs Intel Core i3-12100

Core i5-10600 vs Core i3-12100 benchmarks

Our benchmark analysis concludes that the Core i5-10600 performs better than the Core i3-12100. Despite this, the Core i3-12100 has the advantage in our gaming benchmark.

When comparing core counts for these CPUs, we notice that the Core i5-10600 has significantly more cores with 6 cores compared to the Core i3-12100 that has 4 cores. It also has more threads than the Core i3-12100. According to our data, the Core i5-10600 and Core i3-12100 have the same clock speed. Despite this, the Core i5-10600 has a slightly higher turbo speed. The Core i3-12100 outputs less heat than Core i5-10600 thanks to a slightly lower TDP. This measures the amount of heat they output and can be used to estimate power consumption.

The more cores a CPU has, the better the overall performance will be in parallel workloads such as multitasking. Many CPUs have more threads than cores, this means that each physical core is split into multiple logical cores, making them more efficient. Indeed, the Core i5-10600 has more threads than cores. Each physical core is split into multiple threads.