Intel Pentium 3550M

The Intel Pentium 3550M is an inexpensive dual-core processor for laptops launched in Q4 2013. It is based on the Haswell architecture and is manufactured in 22nm. Each core offers a base speed of 2.3 GHz and does not support CPU Turbo Boost. Compared to other CPUs of the Core i3, Core i5 or Core i7 series, many features like AES, AVX, Turbo Boost and Hyper-Threading have been disabled.

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.

Due to these changes, the performance should be similar to the Ivy Bridge-based and somewhat higher clocked Pentium 2030M. This provides sufficient power for typical office and multimedia purposes.

The integrated Intel HD Graphics (Haswell) offers 10 Execution Units (EUs) clocked at 400 MHz up to 1100 MHz with Turbo Boost, making it a bit faster than the old HD Graphics (Ivy Bridge). Compared to the HD 4000 or HD 4600, however, the performance is much lower.

The Pentium 3550M is rated at a TDP of 37 W including the graphics card, memory controller and VRMs.  Therefore, the CPU is suited for laptops 14-inches or greater.