Intel Pentium N3540

The Intel Pentium N3540 is a power efficient quad-core SoC for entry-level notebooks. It is clocked at 2.16 GHz base clock and can boost up to 2.66 GHz (Burst clock speed). The Pentium is part of the Bay Trail-M platform. Thanks to the specially optimized 22 nanometer low-power process (P1271) with tri-gate transistors, performance and energy efficiency have been significantly improved compared to previous Intel Atom CPUs.

Architecture

The processor cores are based on the new Silvermont architecture, which is an out-of-order design for the first time. The increased utilization of the pipeline and many other improvements (optimized branch prediction, increased buffers, enhanced decoders) have increased the performance per clock by about 50 percent. At the same time, however, the Hyper-Threading feature of the previous generation has been removed. Other major changes are the support for new instruction set extensions such as SSE 4.1 and 4.2 as well as AES-NI (depending on the model).

Performance

Thanks to 4 CPU cores and a clock speed of up to 2.66 GHz, the Pentium N3540 is significantly faster than previous Intel Atoms. Overall, the performance is similar to the AMD Kabini APU A6-5200. For everyday tasks such as Internet or Office the N3540 is adequate, but not for very complex software or modern games.

Graphics

The HD Graphics (Bay Trail) is based on the Intel Gen7 architecture, which supports DirectX 11 and is also found in the Ivy Bridge series (e.g. HD Graphics 4000). With only 4 EUs (Execution Units) and a relatively low clock speed of 313 - 896 MHz, the GPU is even slower than the HD Graphics (Ivy Bridge). Therefore, only older and less demanding games will run fluently. Compared to the HD Graphics in the slower Pentium N3510 and N3520, the N3530 and N3540 are clocked slightly faster (750/854 MHz vs. 896 MHz).

Power Consumption

The entire SoC is rated at a TDP of 7.5 Watts (4.5 SDP - Scenario Design Power). Thus, the chip can be used in compact subnotebooks and convertibles.

Benchmarks