Intel Core i7-4600U

The Intel Core i7-4600U is an ULV (ultra low voltage) dual-core processor for ultrabooks launched in Q3 2013. It is based on the Haswell architecture and is manufactured in 22nm. Due to Hyper-Threading, the two cores can handle up to four threads in parallel, leading to better utilization of the CPU. Each core offers a base speed of 2.1 GHz, but can dynamically increase clock rates with Turbo Boost up to 3.3 GHz for 1 active core (2.9 GHz for 2 cores).

Haswell is the successor to the Ivy Bridge architecture with improvements on both GPU and CPU performance. The CPUs are produced in 22nm and offer an optimized branch prediction as well as additional execution ports, improving the performance per clock by almost 10 percent. Furthermore, new features like AVX2 and FMA should increase the performance in future applications.

The performance of the Core i7-4600U is similar to the old and slightly higher clocked Core i7-3687U. However, when using new instruction sets such as AVX2, the performance can be significantly higher. Thus, the CPU has sufficient power for office and multimedia purposes as well as more demanding applications.

The integrated HD Graphics 4400 offers 20 Execution Units (EUs) clocked at 200 MHz up to 1100 MHz with Turbo Boost, making it somewhat faster than the HD Graphics 4000 at similar clock speeds. However, the HD 4400 is a bit slower than the HD 5000 found on other ULV models (e.g. i7-4650U).

The i7-4600U is rated at a TDP of 15 W including the graphics card, memory controller, VRMs and the integrated chipset. Therefore, the CPU is suited for small ultrabooks 11-inches or greater.