Intel Core i7-5650U Review

The Core i7-5650U is one of Intel's high-end-low-power Laptop processors. It was released in 2015 with 2 cores and 4 threads. With base clock at 2.2GHz, max speed at 3.2GHz, and a 15W power rating. The Core i7-5650U is based on the Broadwell 14nm family and is part of the Core i7 series.

Core i7-5650U is also the successor of Intel's last gen Core i7-4650U processor that was based on the Haswell and 22nm process and was released in 2013.

Now, we're asking ourselves whether or not the Intel Core i7-5650U finally dethrones the Pro A6-8500B as the de facto ruler of the mainstream processors. Ultimately, it depends: the Core i7-5650U doesn't reach the same single-core performance as AMD, but we're starting to see more games adopt multi-threaded CPUs, so that doesn't matter as much.

Intel Core i7 8th Generation, and the Broadwell architecture itself, is notable because it leads 14nm processors to the mainstream for the first time. But, there’s a lot more going on under the hood than just a smaller manufacturing node.

The Core i7-5650U takes the basic ingredients of the Broadwell microarchitecture, which brings an average of 15% more instructions per cycle (IPC) throughput, and 14nm process and melds them into a high-performance chip that is impressive across our test suite, especially when we factor in the competitive pricing, backward compatibility with most FCBGA1168 socket motherboards, unlocked overclocking features, and bundled cooler.

But, like most humans, if you do things other than gaming, the Core i7-5650U offers a better mixture of performance in single- and multi-threaded applications. The Core i7-5650U offers twice the threads of the price-comparable Pro A6-8500B, and it wields them to great effect in threaded workloads. As such, rendering and encoding remain a strong suit of the Core i7 chips, and Intel's improvements to AVX throughput have yielded impressive results.

Intel Core i7 8 Generation is finally here, and the Intel Core i7-5650U might just be the poster child for what this generation of processors has in store for consumers. Sure, it might have stuck with the 2-core, 4-thread setup, which it inherited from its predecessor, the Core i7-4650U. However, with the new 14nm manufacturing process, it delivers a far better performance at lower power consumption.

This decision to 14nm has brought a beefy 15% boost to IPC (instructions per clock) performance. Effectively, compared to a Core i7 7.5-Generation processor at the same clock speed, you will get a straight 15% increase in performance. That’s not big enough to be evident in day-to-day workloads, but it does still mean something.

One of the nice things about the Intel Core i7-5650U processors is that the retail boxed models come with a CPU cooler. So, you can pick something like the Intel Core i7-5650U up for $426 and don’t need to spend any extra money on CPU cooling.

The Intel Core i7-5650U retail boxed processor comes with the traditional ‘pancake’ CPU cooler. Nothing fancy, but it gets the job done on this processor which is rated at 15W TDP. You do not need to have an aftermarket cooling solution unless you want to.

Intel arms Core i7-5650U with a 2.2 GHz base frequency that jumps as high as 3.2 GHz under lightly-threaded tasks. The Core i7-5650U also offers a 2.2 GHz clock rate with all cores active. Meanwhile, AMD keeps its Pro A6-8500B operating at a static 3 GHz clock rate.