Intel Core i3-3120M vs Intel Pentium Silver N5000

Core i3-3120M vs Pentium Silver N5000 comparison

In our benchmarks, the Pentium Silver N5000 beats the Core i3-3120M in overall performance. Furthermore, our gaming benchmark shows that it also outperforms the Core i3-3120M in all gaming tests too.

When comparing core counts for these CPUs, we notice that the Pentium Silver N5000 has significantly more cores with 4 cores compared to the Core i3-3120M that has 2 cores. But they both have the same number of threads. Our comparison shows that the Core i3-3120M has a significantly higher clock speed compared to the Pentium Silver N5000. The Pentium Silver N5000 outputs less heat than Core i3-3120M thanks to a significantly lower TDP. This measures the amount of heat they output and can be used to estimate power consumption.

Most CPUs have more threads than cores. This technology, colloquially called hyperthreading, improves performance by splitting a core into multiple virtual ones. This provides more efficient utilisation of a core. Indeed, the Core i3-3120M has more threads than cores. Each physical core is split into multiple threads.