The Intel Core i7-4700HQ is a high-end quad-core processor for laptops. It is based on the Haswell architecture and manufactured in 22nm. Due to Hyperthreading, the four cores can handle up to eight threads in parallel leading to better utilization of the CPU. Each core offers a base speed of 2.4 GHz but can dynamically increase clock rates with Turbo Boost up to 3.2 GHz (for 4 active cores), 3.3 GHz (for 2 active cores) and 3.4 GHz (for 1 active core).

Haswell is the successor to the Ivy Bridge architecture with improvements on both GPU and CPU performance. The CPUs are produced in 22nm and offer an optimized branch prediction as well as additional execution ports. Furthermore, new features like AVX2 and FMA should increase the performance in future applications.

The performance of the Core i7-4700HQ is slightly above a similarly clocked Ivy Bridge processor due to the architectural improvements. As a result, overall performance is similar to the Ivy Bridge based Core i7-3740QM.

The integrated Intel HD Graphics 4600 offers 20 Execution Units (EUs) clocked at 400 MHz up to 1200 MHz with Turbo Boost, making it about 30 % faster than the HD 4000.