Many people think about Intel branding this way. And I blame Intel for the confusion. The number after the "i" is not what matters when comparing chips between generations, it's the number after. This is a 3rd generation chip as you can see it's a 3000 series.
Currently for sale are generation 9 (9000), and these are even out the door soon. 10th gen is right around the corner.
Within these thousand series are the ACTUAL part numbers.
Ex: 9900K, 9980XE, etc.
These names are even more confusing but are what tell you the real power of a chip within the lineup for that year.
The newer i3 wins a few, and has much lower power consumption, but the old i7 wins more. Naturally the 2018 i7 thoroughly defeats the eight year old one (while using more power):
And not only that. The K series is the unlocked high-performance version of the desktop series. Whereas U is the low-voltage/ultrabook version of the mobile series. So they are sitting pretty much at the opposite end of the spectrum (if we remove server and phone CPUs from the picture), and it's no huge surprise that it still shows up as faster.
> The i7-2600K is a desktop CPU, the i3-8121U is a laptop CPU.
The i3-8121U is a low-power CPU. Low-power processors often end up in desktops like the Mac Mini (which doesn't use that specific model but has used U-series processors) or the Intel NUC (which uses that exact CPU):
Meanwhile the i3-8350K is the top end i3 which has the same number of cores and cache and a higher clock speed than the i7-2600K. No surprise it wins when the only thing it really lacks is hyperthreading, and even that causes it to lose some of the threaded tests.
The point was that e.g. an old quad core could often beat a new dual core. Every new dual core i3 is low-power, but if you want to see the 2600K acquitting itself well against a modern dual core "desktop" processor, here you are:
Currently for sale are generation 9 (9000), and these are even out the door soon. 10th gen is right around the corner.
Within these thousand series are the ACTUAL part numbers.
Ex: 9900K, 9980XE, etc.
These names are even more confusing but are what tell you the real power of a chip within the lineup for that year.