Intel Core i7-3960X vs Intel Core i5-1235U

Core i7-3960X vs Core i5-1235U specs and performance

In our benchmarks, the Core i7-3960X beats the Core i5-1235U in overall performance. Despite this, the Core i5-1235U has the advantage in our gaming benchmark.

With info from our database, we find that the Core i5-1235U has significantly more cores with 10 cores whereas the Core i7-3960X has 6 cores. But they both have the same number of threads. With our hardware info, we find that the Core i7-3960X has a significantly higher clock speed than the Core i5-1235U. Despite this, the Core i5-1235U has a slightly higher turbo speed. The Core i5-1235U outputs less heat than Core i7-3960X thanks to a significantly lower TDP. 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 i7-3960X has more threads than cores. Each physical core is split into multiple threads.