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How to explain (laymans terms)

Just tell him to use his common sense. Hardware evolves, Intel aren't gonna make new chips slower than older chips. Things get better. Simple :D
 
I always explain how things like this work using a funnel as an example.

A celeron is a small funnel with a very narrow top, and a very narrow bottom for passing information through, a new CPU is a very wide, very big funnel which can take a lot of information on board and pass it through very quickly.

Its not exactly how CPU's work, but the person you are explaining it to doesnt know any better anyway.
 
Lots of explanations, I'll add one too :p

the guy needs to know all ghz and mhz arent equal. A certain amount of tasks get done per 1 megahert.

An i5 gets more tasks done per 1 megahert than a celeron, its as simple as that.

Its just like having a guy who can do maths in his head faster than another guy.

It's actually work done per cycle as mentioned earlier. but tasks done per megahert may be more understandable
 
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Send him over to these forums and tell him simply, how many people do you see using a Celeron.....now look how many i5 owners are on here, surely they can't all be wrong.......or can they ? :p
 
Layman's terms: the less you pay, the worse the product, and the less happy you'll be with it.

That's pretty much a constant everywhere :)
 
Layman's terms : MAGNETS!

A decent explanation : Your old processor is crap and you noticed everything is running slow, the new processor is fast and will make your things run fast.

......
 
Reapers analogy is the only one you should consider using, the rest are well, pointless! his is the one that best explains the difference, and why it is different. the I5 is substantially faster than the Celeron because it has more lanes and much bigger buses, the speed limit is ever so slightly lower but the greatly increased capacity of each bus more than offsets that seeming 'hindrance', when I used to work in a computer 'shop' it was similar to the way I used to explain why one processor was better than another, even though conventional thinking would imply the slower one is faster! since some places insist! that the higher the Mhz, the faster the processor, taking nothing else into account! ;)
 
Reaper 392 said:
unfortunately that motorway lanes explanation would make your friend head straight to the AMD 1100T, being a 6 core @ 3.3Ghz, which is somewhere we dont want him going. you need your friend to take into account work done per clock cycle as well (which should tell him why the 2500k is better than the 1100T)

i'm pretty pants at analogies, but i'll do my best to expand the motorway explanation:

imagine a motorway specifically for buses (to make my analogy a lot easier). the best motorway would be the one that can carry the most people from one end to another in the shortest time.
- the number of cores on the processor will be equivalent to the number of lanes on the motorway. more lanes (core) means more buses
- the clock speed is like the speed limit, the higher the clock speed, the faster the buses can go
- the work per clock cycle is like the number of people you can get on each bus. obviously the more people you can get on the bus the better it will be

if he can understand this then you might want to tell him about overclocking (in the motorway analogy this would be increasing the speed limit) and hyperthreading (which i dont understand well enough to put into the analogy)
Click to expand...

Hyperthreading, in that analogy, would be making sure each bus in each lane was as full as it could possibly be, while without hyperthreading some of those buses are only half full.

Either way, the simpliest way in laymans terms is to tell him, its really a heck of a lot faster and thats it.
 
4 big pipes with a slower pump versus 2 smaller pipes with a slightly faster pump.

With the option of speeding up the pump.
 
TheJackal said:
ok maybe I got that confused with multiprocessing, it was along time ago.
However, they were in effect crippled processors with features disabled.
Either way the finer points would be lost on the OPs friend.
Click to expand...

When talking to 'newbies' such as this friend the simple equation "Celeron = bad" is probably a fair one to use; however on a forum like this you will always get people picking you up on factual inaccuracies :)

The celerons were not always bad, the very first ones didn't have L2 cache but soon after Intel brought out Mendicino which were pretty damned good considering the price. They had only a quarter of the cache of a P2 HOWEVER the cache ran at full speed not half speed so performance was extremely close to that of a P2 when running the same FSB and Clockspeed. This also helped with overclocking, I used to run a Celeron 300A at 105mhz bus (472.5mhz) which made it at least as fast as the stock speed of the most expensive consumer CPU on the market (P2-450).
 
Reaper 392 said:
unfortunately that motorway lanes explanation would make your friend head straight to the AMD 1100T, being a 6 core @ 3.3Ghz, which is somewhere we dont want him going. you need your friend to take into account work done per clock cycle as well (which should tell him why the 2500k is better than the 1100T)

i'm pretty pants at analogies, but i'll do my best to expand the motorway explanation:

imagine a motorway specifically for buses (to make my analogy a lot easier). the best motorway would be the one that can carry the most people from one end to another in the shortest time.
- the number of cores on the processor will be equivalent to the number of lanes on the motorway. more lanes (core) means more buses
- the clock speed is like the speed limit, the higher the clock speed, the faster the buses can go
- the work per clock cycle is like the number of people you can get on each bus. obviously the more people you can get on the bus the better it will be

if he can understand this then you might want to tell him about overclocking (in the motorway analogy this would be increasing the speed limit) and hyperthreading (which i dont understand well enough to put into the analogy)
Click to expand...

drunkenmaster said:
Hyperthreading, in that analogy, would be making sure each bus in each lane was as full as it could possibly be, while without hyperthreading some of those buses are only half full.

Either way, the simpliest way in laymans terms is to tell him, its really a heck of a lot faster and thats it.
Click to expand...

Nope in that analogy, hyperthreading would be;

Where there is a sufficient gap between buses on the motorway, another bus can join the motorway in that gap from a slip road :)
 
Best analogy I've found is an engine:

a 1L V-twin (celeron) at 2.6k rpm vs an 8L 4-cylinder engine at 2.5k rpm, which is more powerful? Even though the celeron is running at a higher clockspeed (rpm), each core (cylinder) does less work.

I've found it suits most comparisons
 
Tell him the celeron is like 2 chimp brains while the i5 is like 4 human brains... and pray he hasn't watched Rise of the Planet of the Apes.
 
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