Intel Pentium 3556U

The Intel Pentium 3556U is an entry-level, ULV (ultra low voltage) dual-core processor clocked at 1.7 GHz and was launched in Fall 2013. It is based on the Haswell architecture and is manufactured in 22nm. Compared to the Core i3, Core i5 and Core i7 CPUs, many features like Turbo Boost, Hyper-Threading, AVX and AES-NI are 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 performance per clock by almost 10 percent.

The performance of the Pentium 3556U is somewhere in range of the slightly higher clocked Pentium 2117U and 2127U, which are based on Ivy Bridge. The CPU has sufficient power for most office and multimedia purposes.

The integrated HD Graphics (Haswell) offers 10 Execution Units (EUs) clocked at 200 - 1000 MHz with Turbo Boost, making it somewhat faster than the former HD Graphics (Ivy Bridge). However, the HD Graphics (Haswell) is significantly slower than the HD Graphics 4400 and HD Graphics 5000 found on a number of other Haswell ULV models.

The Pentium 3556U 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.