The Intel Pentium Gold G5500 was a desktop processor with 2 cores, launched in April 2018, at an MSRP of $75. It is part of the Pentium Gold lineup, using the Coffee Lake architecture with Socket 1151. Thanks to Intel Hyper-Threading the core-count is effectively doubled, to 4 threads. Pentium Gold G5500 has 4 MB of L3 cache and operates at 3.8 GHz. Intel is building the Pentium Gold G5500 on a 14 nm production process, the transistor count is unknown. The multiplier is locked on Pentium Gold G5500, which limits its overclocking capabilities.
With a TDP of 54 W, the Pentium Gold G5500 consumes typical power levels for a modern PC. Intel's processor supports DDR4 memory with a dual-channel interface. The highest officially supported memory speed is 2400 MT/s, but with overclocking (and the right memory modules) you can go even higher. ECC memory is supported, too, which is an important capability for mission-critical systems, to avoid data corruption. For communication with other components in the system, Pentium Gold G5500 uses a PCI-Express Gen 3 connection. This processor features the UHD Graphics 630 integrated graphics solution.
Hardware virtualization is available on the Pentium Gold G5500, which greatly improves virtual machine performance. Additionally, IOMMU virtualization (PCI passthrough) is supported, so that guest virtual machines may directly use host hardware. Programs using Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) will run on this processor, boosting performance for calculation-heavy applications. Besides AVX, Intel is including the newer AVX2 standard, too, but not AVX-512.