Thin and light laptops top out with 11th-gen i7 processors, while beefy workstations or gaming laptops may feature a Comet Lake i9. If you’re shopping for a laptop, it’s less about the processor you should choose and more about the laptop’s design. Intel staggered its last two mobile releases, porting the desktop Comet Lake design to laptops before releasing its 11th-gen Tiger Lake platform.

The 11700K is around $150 cheaper, too, depending on where you look.įor mobile, you have the choice between a newer i7 or an older i9. Without a core advantage, the 11900K doesn’t have the same reach that the 10900K did in multithreaded workloads. The current i9 and i7 processors are very similar on desktop, as we’ll get into in the next section. The newer CPU comes with two fewer cores and four fewer threads, but it maintains a high boost clock.

Intel recently replaced the 10900K with the 11900K, which looks like an odd step back. Ryzen 9 7950X3D: 3D V-cache comparedĬES 2023: AMD Ryzen 7000 laptops CPUs go up to 16 cores However, there was almost no difference between Photoshop's observable performance between the two. In the end, I let my techno-lust for that little bit of extra speed, plus a desire for more than two cores, win out, and I got the Mac Pro. In my case, it came down to a choice between the 3.06 GHz iMac and the 3.2 GHz Mac Pro. My two cents, but I feel like I know what I am talking about here - I use Photoshop extensively, and ran exactly the sort of tests I am speaking of before buying my current machine (of course I ended up maxing out EVERYTHING, but not everyone will have that luxury). Spend your money on GHz and GB, not number of cores! You will see a direct correlation between the core speed and your observed performance, and pretty much NO correlation between the number of cores and your observed performance.

Play around with it on a variety of different Mac Pros and iMacs (and they are only TWO cores). If you want to prove this to yourself, go to your nearest Apple Store and bring a USB stick with a large layered Photoshop file on it. Whatever your budget is, maximize your core speed and your RAM, not your number of cores. Right now, that is the determining factor for how quickly Photoshop will crank through difficult stuff, assuming you have equal amounts of RAM. I would go with the fastest clock speed you can get.

8 core mac pro vs i7