> The only difference in the processors is the Xeon supports ECC, while the Core i7 doesn't. But Dell isn't shipping the laptop with ECC anyway.
The clock is faster, try the compare link[0].
And since I originally bought a XPS 15 with the i7-6700HQ then scored a deal on a Precision E3-1505M motherboard and frankensteined my laptop, I spent 30 seconds doing a benchmark[1]. The tl;dr is that for 6% faster clock, you actually get about 10% better performance, so the cache is contributing. Is it worth the Xeon mark-up? Probably not if I didn't come across a deal, but hey, this thing still costs way less then the local fruit farm alternative.
Now the interesting question is of course whether that 3 % difference holds up when these are used in an actual laptop, ie. does it make a difference before all of them throttle anyway?
> does it make a difference before all of them throttle anyway?
I thought this as well, figured the i7-6700HQ was popular because it maxed out the thermal design, but haven't observed this.
Mine didn't throttle at all. Test setup was on a desk plugged in to the 130W power adapter, nothing special. The benchmark ran for 10 minutes without throttling, note that Github tests show that the first pass was just as fast as the last.
If anyone is really interested, I can run the tests again, but I expected it would throttle after a few minutes of the fans roaring and hence why I ran a few tests back to back and averaged them. Also, I cut the test short because I wanted to swap the motherboards and get on with life. :)
It may throttle if the Nvidia GPUs were enabled and working at full load, but they weren't as this is how I normally work and what I bought the laptop to do.
Update: Ran CPU Burn's `burnmmx` x 8 for 20 minutes and monitored it with i7z, and the cores remained at 3.3GHz the entire time with the cores ranging from 60C - 70C. Recorded it with asciinema, but apparently it doesn't play nice with tmux so it's not really readable.
The clock is faster, try the compare link[0].
And since I originally bought a XPS 15 with the i7-6700HQ then scored a deal on a Precision E3-1505M motherboard and frankensteined my laptop, I spent 30 seconds doing a benchmark[1]. The tl;dr is that for 6% faster clock, you actually get about 10% better performance, so the cache is contributing. Is it worth the Xeon mark-up? Probably not if I didn't come across a deal, but hey, this thing still costs way less then the local fruit farm alternative.
[0] http://ark.intel.com/compare/88967,88970,89608
[1] https://github.com/kylemanna/dell-xps-9550-precision-5510