CPU Comparisons

When I was a young whipper-snapper, working at the “data processing” centre, you could see if one CPU was better than another one by the CPU name/number. No one wanted an 8086 once the 286’s came out. Then a 386 was what you wanted for the latest multitasking support, but only till the 486 was available, then you wanted that for the gargantuan memory addressing.

With that idea firmly in mind, I’ wanted an i5 to be better than an i3, and an i7 better than all of them, but it’s apparently not that simple . I do come across people in forums talking about ‘generations’ of Intel processors - so all this is probably decodable, but I’m not exactly sure how.