What are the differences in the three types of CPU?

Answer 1

There are many more than 3 types of CPUs. There is no way to categorize all CPUs into 3 major types any more, although in the past there have been. I can only guess what makes you think there are 3 types. Here are some answers which will teach you more about how the electronics and PC industry works:

You can say there are/were 3 common major types of CPUs because of their "instruction set". The instruction set is everything, programmers must write software using languages that the specific CPU instructions understand.

1. x86 CPUs: made by Intel, AMD. Works with Windows. For the past 4 years or so, Apple/Mac is also x86.

2. PPC: what Apple/Mac CPUs were in the past. Windows will not run on PPC, but Linux can.

3. ARM: what cell phones and smartphones use.

There are also 1 core, 2 core, 3 core, 4 core CPUs ETC. These are no different fundamentally, some single CPUs have 6 or 12 cpus built into 1.

Now, what I guess you were really asking about? Intels latest architecture CPUs... the i3, i5, i7.

The answer is sad. There is no difference between these 3. i3 is meant to be budget, i5 general use, and i7 high end, professional, entertainment. However, there are i3 and i5 CPUs that are much better than some cheap i7. Usually i7 is better but not always.

Intel does not want us to understand, because they want us to pay the most for what we don't need.

i7 are the only quad core out of the 3 but i3 and i5 have 4 logical threads (like virtual cores).