Why did intel make a 2.2ghz i7?

My laptop has a 2.0 GHz quad-core i7.

There are two main reasons why you might sell slower clock speed processors.

One is that when you run a processor at a lower clock speed, it consumes less power. This is really handy in laptops, where how much power it eats determines how long you can run it unplugged.

The second is that it improves yield and therefore reduces cost. Having worked for Intel's manufacturing arm in its yield department, I know a little bit about this.

The two main categories for yield loss are defect-related issues (something about the process goes wrong, such as a particle getting stuck in there and touching two wires together, which makes the chip not work) and performance-related issues (there's nothing physically wrong with it, it works, but it's just not fast enough or it eats too much power).

If you can have a bunch of finished silicon that runs correctly at a specified speed and power consumption, that's great, but its maximum speed will vary by as much as 66% in some cases -- and the faster parts tend to consume more power even when you slow down the clock rate, which means you can't just target the fastest possible speed and hope everything works out. It's a tradeoff between getting more fast parts and getting more parts that eat too much power to be useful. There's also a defect aspect and some statistical process control aspects to targeting, but this is not the place to describe those. Let's just leave it at this: the speed and power of finished parts vary even when they work properly.

So if you can only sell parts that run at 3.5GHz, then anything that doesn't run at that clock speed is bad and you have to throw it away. But if you can also sell it as a cheaper product if it only runs at 2.2GHz, then you don't have to throw it away, and that cuts the cost of producing chips which keeps the price at a level where people want to buy more.

And a final note about my 2.0 GHz i7:

I ran a bunch of benchmarks on my laptop against my desktop which has a 3.5 GHz i5. Besides the processor, everything about the two systems are roughly equivalent except my laptop's hard drive is a little slower -- same amount of RAM at the same clock speed and only single channel, neither have a graphics card and only rely in the IGP on the 2nd-gen Core processors for graphics.

When you run the benchmarks, the ones that gauge processor speed by itself show that the two are nearly identical in performance, with the i5 only getting a slight edge in single-threaded applications despite its much higher clock speed. The i7 does better in graphics performance, and both are exactly matched for everything else except hard drive read/write speed, where the desktop gets a slight edge since it has a 7200 RPM drive compared to the 5400 in my laptop.

I think I know what you mean in your question. Why did intel make a 2.2ghz i7 and a 2.53ghz i3. The answer is simple. First of all, most i7 processors have 4 cores, while i3 processors only have 2 cores. In simple calculations, this means that the i7 processor really is at 8.8ghz (4 cores x 2.2ghz), while the i3 is 5.06ghz (2 cores x 2.53ghz). Then, the i7 processor has hyper-threading technology, which means each core is then split into two virtual cores. Therefore, the i7 processor would then be at 17.6ghz virtually, while the i3 would be at 5.06ghz. Which one is faster? Definitely the i7 processor. I hope this answers your question.

by making the i7 2.2ghz they were thinking of newer os's like w8, and some gamers. this processor at this speed can run most high end games & is pretty fast. check out http://www.intel.com/support

Probably because people would buy it?

I DON'T KNOW ASK INTEL!!!!