Intel Core i5-7300U vs Intel Core i7-8550U

Core i5-7300U vs Core i7-8550U benchmarks

In our benchmarks, the Core i7-8550U beats the Core i5-7300U in overall performance. Furthermore, our gaming benchmark shows that it also outperforms the Core i5-7300U in all gaming tests too.

When comparing core counts for these CPUs, we notice that the Core i7-8550U has significantly more cores with 4 cores compared to the Core i5-7300U that has 2 cores. It also has more threads than the Core i5-7300U. These CPUs have different clock speeds. Indeed, the Core i5-7300U has a significantly higher clock speed compared to the Core i7-8550U. Despite this, the Core i7-8550U has a slightly higher turbo speed. Both these chips have an identical TDP (Thermal Design Power). This measures the amount of heat they output and can be used to estimate power consumption.

Modern CPUs generally have more logical cores than physical cores, this means that each core is split into multiple virtual cores, improving efficiency for parallel workloads. Indeed, the Core i5-7300U has more threads than cores. Each physical core is split into multiple threads.