I am about to buy a laptop, nothing too powerful, but good enough to program on it. Linux will be the system and i will do android, c/c++ ,python... But no advanced graphics. I found few laptops and main difference between them is processor. Some have Intel Mobile Pentium N3710 and some Intel Mobile Pentium N4200. Could someone give any recommendations on which processor to go for, considering above requirements.
1 Answer
Summary
When it comes to considering processors directly, my preferred method of doing so is evaluating their online benchmarks. This allows you to rank processors relative to each other quite easily without actually having them on hand.
In general, it looks like the N4200 is going to be the better choice as Intel's MSRP appraisal of both processors is the same at exactly $161.00
Straight line performance
Some of the immediate differences between the N4200 (Released Jan 2016) and N3710 (Released July 2016) is that the N4200:
- Real world performance is about 50% better than the N3710 according to it's PassMark score.
- Ultimately outperforms the N3710 in all common benchmarking software.
Power Consumption
In terms of power consumption, each processor is estimated to cost about 1.25$/year, so there is no effective difference in power consumption, However; the N4200 will output about 12.8% more performance per watt making it more efficient than the N3710 variant.
Memory Support
According to the official Intel spec sheets of the respective processors [N4200 here], [N3710 here]:
It appears that the N4200 is equipped to handle DDR3L/LPDDR3 up to 1866 MT/s, and LPDDR4 up to 2400 MT/s, while the N3710 only supports DDR3L-1600. This means that the newer N4200 processors will be able to handle newer RAM types with faster timings. This will effect the effective application load in speed.
Interestingly enough, however; the N3710 supports twice the Maximum memory bandwidth.
Special Considerations
CPUBoss reports that the N3710 is capable of being pushed further via Overclocking than the N4200 by nearly (45.5% by air, difference is nominal if you are using water cooling (7%)). This is only applicable if your motherboard supports overclocking, or whether there are any linux based programs that you can control your processor speed from.
