What is the difference between mobile processors and regular ones?

Question

I am trying to get myself a custom built laptop and while I was making a choice of what goes into the laptop, the processor section had some interesting choices:

Intel® Celeron® Dual Core Processor B840 (1.90 GHz) 2MB Cache

Intel® Core™i3 Dual Core Mobile Processor i3-2350M (2.30GHz) 3MB 
Intel® Core™i5 Dual Core Mobile Processor i5-2450M (2.50GHz) 3MB 
Intel® Core™i5 Dual Core Mobile Processor i5-2520M (2.50GHz) 3MB

Intel® Core™i7 Dual Core Mobile Processor i7-2640M (2.80GHz) 4MB
Intel® Core™i7 Quad Core Mobile Processor i7-2670QM (2.20GHz) 6MB
Intel® Core™i7 Quad Core Mobile Processor i7-2760QM (2.40GHz) 6MB
Intel® Core™i7 Quad Core Mobile Processor i7-2860QM (2.50GHz) 8MB

I assumed that mobile processors are less capable than the regular ones, (since they are small and go into mobiles and what not) but something tells me this assumption is very stupid, even though wikipedia says otherwise

I really want to get a quad core, i7 (fastest, let's say) but I don't want a mobile processor, I want a regular one. Some googling got me the differences between quad core and regular processors, but I am unable to find the difference between regular and mobile processors.

So why would anyone offer me to get a mobile processor for my laptop?

Answer 1

Mobile processors are for use in mobile computers, that is computers that are mostly carried around by their owner from place to place rather than being left, unmoving, on a desktop for most of their life.

Mobile processors are obviously optimised for use in laptop/notebook/netbook computers.

• Low current consumption to avoid quickly draining the laptop battery flat.
• Low heat output to avoid overwhelming the limited cooling available in a laptop.

The Processors used in mobile phones (cellphones/feature-phones/smartphones) are a different category (they are mostly ARM processors) and are optimised for even lower power and cooling resources.

Tablets/slates/pads/fondleslabs form a middle ground where traditional desktop/laptop CPU architectures (e.g. x86) and traditional small-device architectures (e.g. ARM) are both used. You can view this as convergence from both directions.

A necessary consequence is that mobile processors are slower but they probably incorporate power-saving tricks that are not so much used in desktop PCs (I think variable CPU clock-rates started in mobile processors).

I wouldn't be surprised if a laptop with a workstation-class CPU had a very short run-time on battery and ran very hot (reducing the overall life of CPU and other components)

Answer 2

you can compare several Intel CPUs at http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/processor-comparison/compare-intel-processors.html to figure out the differences yourself.

The "mobile" ones tend to have a way lower TDP, meaning the produce less heat when operating, which on the one hand means less power consumption -> longer battery life, and on the other hand means less cooling needed, therefore the system may operate more silent and again less power consuming.

People who are interested in AMD CPUs, can find complete information and can compare CPUs using these two lists:

Desktop Processor Solutions

Notebook Processor Solutions