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How to understand all the Intel chip types?

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superboyac:
In my shopping for laptops and tablets, I am becoming increasingly confused by the chip types and what they mean.  Intel is who i'm talking about, but I'm sure AMD is guilty as well.  I'm sure they are doing this on purpose, but that's not the point right now.  I just want someone to clearly explain all the types and differences.  Either eloqeuntly with words, or maybe there are some cool graphics or matrix-type visual guides out there.

Much of this revolves around the question of "which chip is better"?  It's obvious that quad-core is better than duo-core.  But a bunch of terms are being mixed up and intertwined together.  it's hard to know if a particular laptop is better than another.  Again, if it's like i3 and i7, that's easy.  But there's the "i"s, the cores, Atom, Mobile, Centrino, frequency (Hz), etc.  What's going on here?  What is Core 2 Duo??  Does it have two cores?  Why is there both "2" and the word "Duo"?  Is it version 2 of the "core" model line?  What is the equivalent AMD type?

Profit by confusion seems to be the MO for most of these gadgets and doo-dads these days.  There must be something very profitable about not allowing the consumer to really know what you are getting.  The electronics/computer industry is quickly going the way of mattresses.  Nobody here can look at two mattresses in a store and say what is different about the two.  Nobody.  No matter what the display sign says, you will never know.  Comfort-Plus tells me nothing about what the mattress is made of.  They're so bad, you can't find the info even on the manufacturer's website.  My favorite quote is from a guy who used to work in a mattress manufacturing facility, and it went something like:
"We could literally hide an entire bicycle inside of a mattress and you would never know."
--- End quote ---

I think computer parts are moving that way also.  If us geeks weren't so on top of the technology, and if we didn't have a strong PC culture of DIY computers, I can almost guarantee you that the manufacturer's would attempt to blur the detailed information of their components even more than they are trying to now.

Anyway, so who has some good explanations or visuals?

techidave:
I am with you superboyac.  While shopping recently for laptops for school I have come across this very thing.  it is very confusing to compare them.

Eóin:
The i's are the ones to go for. i3 is entry, i5 for powerusers and i7 mainly aimed at server/HPC.

Core 2 was an older architecture, while the Duo means dual core. There were also Core 2 Quads.

Atoms are for lowpower applications such as netbooks, Centrino's are more powerful and geared towards laptops.

It's a bit confusing alright, but wikipedia is very helpful.

superboyac:
It's a bit confusing alright, but wikipedia is very helpful.
-Eóin (September 16, 2010, 05:05 AM)
--- End quote ---
I know how to research and how to use Wikipedia.  But isn't there a nice visual explaining all of this somewhere?  There must some simple way to makes sense of it all without having to read pages of stuff and figure it out yourself.

f0dder:
It's confusing indeed, but you can't really make a single universally easy to understand rating scheme... gigahertz doesn't tell you much about performance, and using some performance rating instead would just get the companies to focus on getting the highest performance for a synthetic benchmark. There's also stuff like power efficiency to count in.

I'm sure it could all be done less confusing than it is now, though.

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