Intel Core i7-8550U vs Intel Core i3-12100

Compare Intel 8th Generation Core i7 4 core CPU vs Intel 12th Generation Core i3 4 core processor, specs and benchmark score. Which is the better CPU for gaming?

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Specifications
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Intel Core i3-12100

Price

The cheapest price from our partner retailers

$ 969.00

$ 128.59

$ 840.41 significantly less expensive

Benchmark Score

Overall Score

A combined score of all workloads

2085 points

5115 points

145% significantly better overall score

Gaming Score

The raw gaming performance with a fast GPU

3523 points

8339 points

136% significantly better gaming score

Multitasking Score

Performance in workloads using up to 8 cores

1671 points

4166 points

149% significantly better multitasking score

Heavy Workload Score

Performance in workloads using up to 16 cores

1597 points

4001 points

150% significantly better heavy workload score

Free CPU Benchmark

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Other Benchmarks

Blender score

Cycles Render (Samples per minute)

43.52 points

111.80 points

156% significantly higher Blender score

Geekbench 5 (multi) score

Multi threaded benchmark

2622 points

6822 points

160% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (multi) score

Geekbench 5 (single) score

Single threaded benchmark

878 points

2105 points

139% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (single) score

Specifications

Cores

Number of physical processing units

Identical

Threads

Number of logical processing units

Identical

Clock Speed

Base frequency at which the chip operates

1.8 GHz

3.3 GHz

83% significantly higher clock speed

Turbo Speed

Higher frequency used for heavy workloads

4 GHz

4.3 GHz

7% slightly higher turbo speed

TDP

Thermal Design Power: Measure of heat generated by the CPU

15 W

300% significantly lower TDP

60 W

PCIe Lanes

Number of physical connections between the CPU and expansion slots

66% significantly more pcie lanes

Memory Channels

Lanes for simultaneous memory access

Identical

Supported Memory

Maximum amount of RAM supported by this CPU

32 GiB

128 GiB

300% significantly more supported memory

L1 Cache

Smallest embedded memory, but the fastest

256 KiB

320 KiB

25% slightly more L1 cache

L3 Cache

General memory pool for all cores

8 MiB

12 MiB

49% significantly more L3 cache

Other details

Rank

Ranking in the hardwareDB database

706th of 1,089

337th of 1,089

Family

The product line

8th Generation Core i7

12th Generation Core i3

Release date

The official date of release of this chip

2017 August

2022 February

Memory Type

The type of memory used by this chip

DDR4-2400

DDR5-4800

Is Unlocked

Can this CPU can be overclocked

Supports ECC memory

Does this CPU support error correcting memory

Core i7-8550U vs Core i3-12100 comparison

In our benchmarks, the Core i3-12100 beats the Core i7-8550U in overall performance. Furthermore, our gaming benchmark shows that it also outperforms the Core i7-8550U in all gaming tests too.

Info from our database shows that they both have the same core count and the same number of threads. These CPUs have different clock speeds. Indeed, the Core i3-12100 has a significantly higher clock speed compared to the Core i7-8550U. Also, the Core i3-12100 has a slightly higher turbo speed. A Core i7-8550U CPU outputs less heat than a Core i3-12100 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 i7-8550U has more threads than cores. Each physical core is split into multiple threads.