Planning to buy a new laptop? Here's how to choose the right Intel CPU for your machine

tech.hindustantimes.com:

Intel CPUs' newer models strike a good balance between power consumption and performance, and we've also gotten plenty of AI-capable Intel processors this year to supercharge Microsoft's Copilot experience, with more coming soon.

If you are planning on buying a new laptop with an Intel CPU, here is what you need to know before you make your decision.

Generation - For a laptop CPU, the most important thing would be to try and get the most recent generation within your budget. More than just performance, the latest generation tends to be more power efficient, may feature improved architectures, and tend to have better specs. Since you can't upgrade the CPU in your laptop, it's important to get the latest generation or one from the previous generation at the very least.

Number of cores - As a rule of thumb, the more the merrier. The total number of CPU cores can directly translate into better computational performance, provided the application can take advantage of all the cores effectively. Intel switched to a hybrid core architecture from the 12th generation onwards, where the CPU has a mix of performance (P-cores) and efficiency cores (E-cores). E-cores are always more in number than P-cores. Intel also has something called Hyper-Threading, a technology that allows more than one process to run on each physical core in order to complete a task quicker.

NPU - A Neural Processing Unit or NPU is a recent addition to Intel CPUs. Basically, this co-processor inside the CPU is used to execute AI related tasks more efficiently. All Copilot laptops and upcoming Intel Copilot+ PCs will have an NPU onboard. This chip will enable new and exclusive AI features in Windows 11, so if you think you'll need them then you need to make sure you have Intel's Core Ultra series processor or newer.

Also read: What is a Copilot+ PC? All models, features, and India availability explained

Cache memory - This is essentially really fast memory that relays data from the RAM to the CPU. The more