Looking at their specs, the i5/7 5/6xxxU processors are really lacking in performance, but a lot of laptops are using them for the low power/price. Would it be worth it to pay extra for an HQ? How does their performance even compare with say 3xxxM?
I don’t think Skylake has increased performance significantly since Ivy Bridge. From what I’ve gathered it’s only like a 5-10 percent increase realistically, you have to take into account that your GPU will sometimes bottleneck the performance.
Skylake isn’t a huge improvement in performance but it is a decent efficiency improvement which will be evident in battery life. But I wouldn’t upgrade just for the processor.
Much better performance per watt, and the newer U series processors have superior integrated graphics to the older M series.
But they’re also lower power, so not a huge general performance boost outside of the graphics, but it should be better. And for some applications, far superior (for example, Skylake is 400% faster than Ivy Bridge for bitcoin mining).
Honestly for general tasks like Word and etc I don’t find much of a difference between the intel i7-4710MQ Haswell which is like the HQ but I can upgrade it in my gaming laptop which has a clock speed of 2.5GHZ and turbo boosts up to 3.5GHZ and is a quad core and my Skylake i5-6300U which is a 2.5GHZ dual core CPU which can turbo boost up to 3.0GHZ in my surface pro 4. For some more serious tasks you might run into issues but otherwise you’ll be fine.