Intel Core i5-3550S vs Intel Core i7-3520M

Core i5-3550S vs Core i7-3520M specs and performance

According to the hardwareDB Benchmark tool, the Core i5-3550S is faster than the Core i7-3520M. Despite this, the Core i7-3520M has the advantage in our gaming benchmark.

When comparing core counts for these CPUs, we notice that the Core i5-3550S has significantly more cores with 4 cores compared to the Core i7-3520M that has 2 cores. But they both have the same number of threads. With our hardware info, we find that the Core i5-3550S has a slightly higher clock speed than the Core i7-3520M. Also, the Core i5-3550S has a slightly higher turbo speed. The Core i7-3520M outputs less heat than Core i5-3550S thanks to a significantly lower TDP. 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. For instance, the Core i5-3550S has the same number of threads as cores. This means the the CPU does not support hyperthreading.