Intel Core i5-9400 vs Intel Core i3-1215U

Core i5-9400 vs Core i3-1215U specs and performance

In our benchmarks, the Core i3-1215U beats the Core i5-9400 in overall performance. Furthermore, our gaming benchmark shows that it also outperforms the Core i5-9400 in all gaming tests too.

When comparing these CPUs we notice that they have the same number of cores but the Core i3-1215U has more threads. Our comparison shows that the Core i5-9400 has a significantly higher clock speed compared to the Core i3-1215U. Despite this, the Core i3-1215U has a slightly higher turbo speed. The Core i3-1215U outputs less heat than Core i5-9400 thanks to a significantly lower TDP. This measures the amount of heat they output and can be used to estimate power consumption. In terms of cache, the Core i3-1215U has significantly more L2 cache when compared to the Core i5-9400. The Core i3-1215U also has slightly more L3 cache.

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. For instance, the Core i5-9400 has the same number of threads as cores. This means the the CPU does not support hyperthreading.