Celeron, Pentium, and Core i3/5/7 are all marketing brand names by Intel. They are not guaranteed to relate to any particular hardware specification or performance.
In particular a ‘Core i5' in an ultra-slim laptop will usually be lower performance than a ‘Core i5' in a bulky gaming laptop which in turn is lower performance than a ‘Core i5' in a desktop PC.
i3 has 2 physical cores and 2 virtual cores. It acts like a quad-core processor, but it technically only has 2 “real” cores, so it struggles under heavy load.
i5 has 4 physical cores and 0 virtual cores. It's a true quad-core processor.
i7 has 4 physical cores and 4 virtual cores, so the operating system acts like you have 8 cores.
Last Updated on 3 years by pinc