My phone's processor has 4 2.36ghz cores and 4 1.84ghz cores. My laptop has 2 2.7ghz cores. Why is my laptop faster?

William

Clock speed and core count aren't the best way to determine how fast a CPU is. It's like trying to figure out how fast a car is by looking at the number of cylinders in the engine and how high it can rev. There are a few other factors involved: -architecture. Mobile CPUs use an architecture called Advanced RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) Machines, or ARM for short. This architecture is designed to minimize the physical size of the CPU, the amount of power it draws, and the amount of heat it generates. Because of how the architecture is designed, it typically uses RAM less efficiently than most other architectures and requires more work to communicate with the software. Desktop/laptop CPUs use an architecture called x86-64, which maximizes performance at the expense of power draw and heat output and requires a physically larger CPU. -instructions per clock (IPC). There really isn't a way to measure this, so this information isn't included in spec sheets. By decreasing the gap between transistors, engineers are able to increase the number of transistors in a CPU and thus increase the processing power without increasing the clock speed or the number of cores. This is why newer CPUs are faster than older CPUs, even if they have the same number of cores and the same clock speed (https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i5-7500-vs-Intel-Core-i5-3570/3648vsm793 ). Part of what makes ARM CPUs so power-efficient is low transistor density, so they will naturally have lower IPC than x86-64 CPUs.

Anonymous

Around 2004 or 2005 is when measuring the clock speed went out the window. The clock speed is actually a measurement of cycles per second, which won't matter much if the CPU is small to begin with. Generally larger CPU's have more transistors, but the arrangement of the transistors in relation to other parts like the cache memory and instruction loaders will make a difference in speed as well. Ultimately it's the transistors that are flipping the Binary 1's to a 0 and vice versa. The only time you can take clock speeds into account is when you're comparing two of the same, or similar CPU Architectures. AMD had a processor that would clock to over 4ghz out of the box, but it was getting beaten by Intel processors with lower clock speeds and less cores. This old AMD CPU had impressive specs on the box but it's overall efficiency and ability wasn't very good. The same thing happened to Intel in 2005 with the old Pentium 4. Pentium 4 processors with a +3.0ghz clock speeds were getting beaten by AMD Athlon 64 processors with a clock speeds of 2.2ghz. Clock speeds don't mean a whole lot anymore because Efficiency, Instruction sets, latency of the cache and overall CPU design is the real factor.

Crim Liar

Because your laptop CPU is actually a more complex chip that can do more things in a shorter amount of time, while your phone CPU is designed to be super energy efficient!