Benchmarks: CPU
It is handy to have both the 7th and 8th Gen Blade Stealth configurations in our charts, and make no mistake, the quad-core upgrade is meaningful. The Core i7-8550U's ability to turbo up to 4GHz has it topping the chart in the single-threaded PiFast test, and the increase in cores delivers almost a 50 per cent performance boost in multi-threaded Cinebench.
Might you have expected even more? Our experience of quad-core, thin-and-light laptops is that the CPUs struggle to maintain top speeds when all cores are working flat out. We see a fair bit of performance variance between runs, and our logs reveal that Blade Stealth is no exception - the Core i7 chip starts off at 3.7GHz across all cores during Handbrake but soon settles to around 2.2-2.3GHz in order to keep temperatures within the desired range.