Intel Core i3-2100 vs Intel Core i5-3550S

Core i3-2100 vs Core i5-3550S benchmarks

In our benchmarks, the Core i5-3550S beats the Core i3-2100 in overall performance. Despite this, the Core i3-2100 has the advantage in our gaming benchmark.

With info from our database, we find that the Core i5-3550S has significantly more cores with 4 cores whereas the Core i3-2100 has 2 cores. But they both have the same number of threads. Our comparison shows that the Core i3-2100 has a slightly higher clock speed compared to the Core i5-3550S. Both these chips have an identical TDP (Thermal Design Power). This measures the amount of heat they output and can be used to estimate power consumption.

Modern CPUs generally have more logical cores than physical cores, this means that each core is split into multiple virtual cores, improving efficiency for parallel workloads. Indeed, the Core i3-2100 has more threads than cores. Each physical core is split into multiple threads.