Intel Core i7-8550U vs Intel Core i7-5500U

Core i7-8550U vs Core i7-5500U specs and performance

Our benchmark analysis concludes that the Core i7-8550U performs better than the Core i7-5500U. Furthermore, our gaming benchmark shows that it also outperforms the Core i7-5500U 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 i7-5500U that has 2 cores. It also has more threads than the Core i7-5500U. Our comparison shows that the Core i7-5500U has a slightly 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. The cache sizes of these CPUs are different. Indeed, the Core i7-8550U has significantly more L2 cache than the Core i7-5500U. The Core i7-8550U also has significantly 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. Indeed, the Core i7-8550U has more threads than cores. Each physical core is split into multiple threads.