Do modern Intel mobile processors feel slow compared to previous generations in laptops?

[GhostRyder]

Just to clarify before I ask everyone their opinion, I am talking specifically about certain lines not the high end performance ones in gaming laptops and such. I am talking about chips like the i7 -1365u and the newer Core 7 165u in most cases. I know lots of these in this area are meant to be lower power options for longer battery life and such and I am not talking about gaming on them or running crazy benchmarks, just every day usage.

So part of my job is ordering new laptops for people at my sites. Over the years I have ordered thousands of laptops and desktops and tested every revision one way or another how they perform in everyday tasks and in performance applications that have to be used. Now I am somewhat restricted in what I can order (Part of a big company and they work out all that behind the scenes) so I cannot choose most of the specs, only the models. With that in mind, most of our laptops use the same processors no matter which model I pick except if I go to the very high end (But I rarely give those out). The normal stuff is my bread and butter which they recently in the last year decided to go with the i7/Core 7 over the i5's ever since we could get the 13th generation.

I did run my own tests on them and these laptops seemed normal to me. However, I started getting complaints pretty quickly and throughout the year about half the people at the sites I manage have given me complaints that their laptops are "Slow". Each time I check with them to see I do agree that loading up applications seems a bit slower than normal when compared to my laptop (Though I have a performance one), but not crazy slow until I started seeing a bunch of people having issues in teams meetings running multiple applications like excel (We have pretty big excel spreadsheets in meetings) and other normal situations that I consider every day usage. These people normally got a laptop swapped that had an i5 from either the 10th generation, 11th, or in some cases 12th and never had any complaints about speed on those to a 13th i7-1365u or Core 7 165u (All these were U series as well in the past). I have tested some of the old laptops doing the same stuff and they do seem significantly more responsive and faster than the current stuff in most situations that the users do. Its gotten to the point I get people who are upset and even a few asking for their old laptop back or to be bumped up to one of the higher performance ones.

I have set these laptops to "Prefer Performance" in Windows which did help a decent amount and made them 'tolerable' to use, however I find it ridiculous these chips are that much slower in every day tasks compared to their predecessors and wonder if others are getting similar results to what I am seeing in regular usage. Yes I have watched benchmarks and when being used in power house applications these chips seem great, but I am talking pretty normal every day usage. I have also made sure everything is running on latest Win 11, BIOS, etc so I cannot update any further on them. I have watched the cores in CPUID and many others applications and it does seem like the issue is the lack of performance cores and Intel's preference of using the E-Cores too much, or that the 2 P Cores become saturated almost instantly (Or at least are in use) and everything else gets pushed to the E-Cores.

Maybe I am crazy (Or crazier than usual), but I just wanted to see if anyone is having the same experience I am on here.

 

[tabascosauz]

Power plan settings and consequent boost behaviour has a significant effect on how "slow" laptops feel, and it's not a Intel thing. Slow application load times.

Changing boost behaviour in GHelper means my 6900HS can feel more like the modern CPPC 8-core it is, or more like a Pentium from 10 years ago.

Been a while since I've used an Intel laptop, but I'd imagine that a similarly drastic difference can be observed when tweaking settings in Throttlestop or something.

It's kinda hard to pin down without more details though other than that it's a Raptor Lake or Meteor Lake -U part. I'm sure we would all agree that a 11800H without power saving is no slouch, but in reality when saddled with all of Dell's garbage it performs probably more like a 8th Gen i5 -U. Unless you're working with a spotless clean install, there's a billion things that can bring laptop perf down

 

[DirtyDingusMcgee]

To me they don't really seem slower......but the performance is definitely not improving very much (if any) from generation to generation. I have a bunch of hp probooks in the field that are 32gb memory and 1tb nvme storage. Now they are all i7s, but from 10, 11, 12, 13 series. Some are U, some are H, some are P......and there is basically no difference in real world performance.

 

[chrcoluk]

It depends, in like for like software environment typically no, instead they feel faster. But if you compare say old laptop on Windows 7 to new laptop on Windows 11, then maybe it would.

 

[dgianstefani]

It depends, in like for like software environment typically no, instead they feel faster. But if you compare say old laptop on Windows 7 to new laptop on Windows 11, then maybe it would.

Ya modern (consumer) Windows feels slow.

Good thing LTSC 24H2 just dropped.

I moved to it from 10 LTSC and it's good.

 

[GhostRyder]

Power plan settings and consequent boost behaviour has a significant effect on how "slow" laptops feel, and it's not a Intel thing. Slow application load times.

Changing boost behaviour in GHelper means my 6900HS can feel more like the modern CPPC 8-core it is, or more like a Pentium from 10 years ago.

Been a while since I've used an Intel laptop, but I'd imagine that a similarly drastic difference can be observed when tweaking settings in Throttlestop or something.

It's kinda hard to pin down without more details though other than that it's a Raptor Lake or Meteor Lake -U part. I'm sure we would all agree that a 11800H without power saving is no slouch, but in reality when saddled with all of Dell's garbage it performs probably more like a 8th Gen i5 -U. Unless you're working with a spotless clean install, there's a billion things that can bring laptop perf down

The 10th generation chip we used and I compare it to is the i5-10310u, 11th and 12 were the equivalent (Sorry not near a PC with the chip to lookup exact). Yea I know bumping it does help but before I didn't really feel the need always to do that versus now and even then they still feel a bit slower in everyday tasks. Maybe that is Windows 11 being wonky but it was just something I observed. I cant run extra applications on these to try and help them as its not company allowed.

Its just annoying I keep getting complaints about them. Its also something I do typically observe. Now some of our PC's use the newer Ult 165H which don't have those issues. Of course those are much more powerful and have more P cores and better boost numbers so it makes sense.

 

[AnotherReader]

Just to clarify before I ask everyone their opinion, I am talking specifically about certain lines not the high end performance ones in gaming laptops and such. I am talking about chips like the i7 -1365u and the newer Core 7 165u in most cases. I know lots of these in this area are meant to be lower power options for longer battery life and such and I am not talking about gaming on them or running crazy benchmarks, just every day usage.

So part of my job is ordering new laptops for people at my sites. Over the years I have ordered thousands of laptops and desktops and tested every revision one way or another how they perform in everyday tasks and in performance applications that have to be used. Now I am somewhat restricted in what I can order (Part of a big company and they work out all that behind the scenes) so I cannot choose most of the specs, only the models. With that in mind, most of our laptops use the same processors no matter which model I pick except if I go to the very high end (But I rarely give those out). The normal stuff is my bread and butter which they recently in the last year decided to go with the i7/Core 7 over the i5's ever since we could get the 13th generation.

I did run my own tests on them and these laptops seemed normal to me. However, I started getting complaints pretty quickly and throughout the year about half the people at the sites I manage have given me complaints that their laptops are "Slow". Each time I check with them to see I do agree that loading up applications seems a bit slower than normal when compared to my laptop (Though I have a performance one), but not crazy slow until I started seeing a bunch of people having issues in teams meetings running multiple applications like excel (We have pretty big excel spreadsheets in meetings) and other normal situations that I consider every day usage. These people normally got a laptop swapped that had an i5 from either the 10th generation, 11th, or in some cases 12th and never had any complaints about speed on those to a 13th i7-1365u or Core 7 165u (All these were U series as well in the past). I have tested some of the old laptops doing the same stuff and they do seem significantly more responsive and faster than the current stuff in most situations that the users do. Its gotten to the point I get people who are upset and even a few asking for their old laptop back or to be bumped up to one of the higher performance ones.

I have set these laptops to "Prefer Performance" in Windows which did help a decent amount and made them 'tolerable' to use, however I find it ridiculous these chips are that much slower in every day tasks compared to their predecessors and wonder if others are getting similar results to what I am seeing in regular usage. Yes I have watched benchmarks and when being used in power house applications these chips seem great, but I am talking pretty normal every day usage. I have also made sure everything is running on latest Win 11, BIOS, etc so I cannot update any further on them. I have watched the cores in CPUID and many others applications and it does seem like the issue is the lack of performance cores and Intel's preference of using the E-Cores too much, or that the 2 P Cores become saturated almost instantly (Or at least are in use) and everything else gets pushed to the E-Cores.

Maybe I am crazy (Or crazier than usual), but I just wanted to see if anyone is having the same experience I am on here.

Recently, I've used three different laptops and the Alder Lake based laptop that I'm using right now sometimes feels more sluggish than the other two. The CPUs are:

• i5-1135G7: Tiger Lake with 4 cores
• i3-1215U: Alder Lake with 2 P cores and 4 E cores
• Ryzen 7 Pro 8840 HS: 8 core Zen 4 in a ThinkPad P14s Gen 5

To no one's surprise, the Zen 4 based Thinkpad is much faster than the other two, but I'm unpleasantly surprised by how slow Alder Lake can feel from time to time. It feels like a regression from Tiger Lake and that's probably due to fewer P cores.

 

[TheLostSwede]

I went from a Core i7-7500U to a Core i5-12500H when I most recently upgraded my laptop, so no, I can't say it feels slower, but that's also an eight year leap between the two CPUs, so a tad hard to compare. However, the Core i7-7500U laptop felt sluggish as anything at the end of its life.

 

[GhostRyder]

Recently, I've used three different laptops and the Alder Lake based laptop that I'm using right now sometimes feels more sluggish than the other two. The CPUs are:

• i5-1135G7: Tiger Lake with 4 cores
• i3-1215U: Alder Lake with 2 P cores and 4 E cores
• Ryzen 7 Pro 8840 HS: 8 core Zen 4 in a ThinkPad P14s Gen 5

To no one's surprise, the Zen 4 based Thinkpad is much faster than the other two, but I'm unpleasantly surprised by how slow Alder Lake can feel from time to time. It feels like a regression from Tiger Lake and that's probably due to fewer P cores.

Yea, I wish they would allow it but we can't use AMD at this time. Now I will say for the users doing heavy multi-threaded tasks (Which are few) even the new laptops complete much faster than the old, but they still struggle on some basics.

My newest laptop I am testing has the Ultra 165-u processor and comparing to previous generation one (i7 1365u) it feels no different. Though I noticed its boost is down and single threaded scroe is slightly down, however it has 2 more E-Cores. Kinda curious on battery life on it currently to see if this change makes a difference.

I went from a Core i7-7500U to a Core i5-12500H when I most recently upgraded my laptop, so no, I can't say it feels slower, but that's also an eight year leap between the two CPUs, so a tad hard to compare. However, the Core i7-7500U laptop felt sluggish as anything at the end of its life.

Oh yea from some of the old 8th gen processors its a huge difference in performance. But a lot of those also only had 8gb of ram that I dealt with LOL (Everything now starts at 32gb)

 

[TheLostSwede]

Oh yea from some of the old 8th gen processors its a huge difference in performance. But a lot of those also only had 8gb of ram that I dealt with LOL (Everything now starts at 32gb)

I was mistaken, it was a Core i7-5600U, so a nine year leap. And yes, only 8 GB of RAM, but I'd installed a WD Blue SATA SSD, over the crappy OEM Samsung SSD it came with, as that SSD caused some serious issues after a few years and it was the biggest factor of that laptop feeling slow at one point.

That said, top tier CPUs from just a few years ago are entry level chips now, so no, laptops haven't gotten slower by any means.