Intel Core i7-6500U vs Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550

Core i7-6500U vs Core 2 Quad Q9550 benchmarks

Our benchmark analysis concludes that the Core 2 Quad Q9550 performs better than the Core i7-6500U. Despite this, the Core i7-6500U has the advantage in our gaming benchmark.

When comparing core counts for these CPUs, we notice that the Core 2 Quad Q9550 has significantly more cores with 4 cores compared to the Core i7-6500U that has 2 cores. But they both have the same number of threads. With our hardware info, we find that the Core 2 Quad Q9550 has a slightly higher clock speed than the Core i7-6500U. A Core i7-6500U CPU outputs less heat than a Core 2 Quad Q9550 CPU because of its 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 i7-6500U has more threads than cores. Each physical core is split into multiple threads.