In terms of overall gaming performance, the AMD APU A6-9550 4-Core 3.8GHz is massively better than the Intel Celeron G550T 2.2GHz when it comes to running the latest games. This also means it will be less likely to bottleneck more powerful GPUs, allowing them to achieve more of their gaming performance potential.

The APU A6-9550 4-Core was released over three years more recently than the Celeron G550T 2.2GHz, and so the APU A6-9550 4-Core is likely to have far better levels of support, and will be much more optimized and ultimately superior to the Celeron G550T 2.2GHz when running the latest games.

The APU A6-9550 4-Core and the Celeron G550T 2.2GHz both have 2 cores, and so are quite likely to struggle with the latest games, or at least bottleneck high-end graphics cards when running them. With a decent accompanying GPU, the APU A6-9550 4-Core and the Celeron G550T 2.2GHz may still be able to run slightly older games fairly effectively.

Both the AMD APU A6-9550 4-Core 3.8GHz and the Intel Celeron G550T 2.2GHz have the same number of threads. Both CPUs have one thread per physical core.

Multiple threads are useful for improving the performance of multi-threaded applications. Additional cores and their accompanying thread will always be beneficial for multi-threaded applications. Hyperthreading will be beneficial for applications optimized for it, but it may slow others down. For games, the number of threads is largely irrelevant, as long as you have at least 2 cores (preferably 4), and hyperthreading can sometimes even hit performance.

More important for gaming than the number of cores and threads is the clock rate. Problematically, unless the two CPUs are from the same family, this can only serve as a general guide and nothing like an exact comparison, because the clock cycles per instruction (CPI) will vary so much.

The APU A6-9550 4-Core and Celeron G550T 2.2GHz are not from the same family of CPUs, so their clock speeds are by no means directly comparable. Bear in mind, then, that while the APU A6-9550 4-Core has a 1.6 GHz faster frequency, this is not always an indicator that it will be superior in performance, despite frequency being crucial when trying to avoid GPU bottlenecking. In this case, however, the difference is probably a good indicator that the is superior.

Aside from the clock rate, the next-most important CPU features for PC game performance are L2 and L3 cache size. Faster than RAM, the more cache available, the more data that can be stored for lightning-fast retrieval. L1 Cache is not usually an issue anymore for gaming, with most high-end CPUs eking out about the same L1 performance, and L2 is more important than L3 - but L3 is still important if you want to reach the highest levels of performance. Bear in mind that although it is better to have a larger cache, the larger it is, the higher the latency, so a balance has to be struck.

The APU A6-9550 4-Core has a 512 KB bigger L2 cache than the Celeron G550T 2.2GHz, and although the APU A6-9550 4-Core does not appear to have an L3 cache, its larger L2 cache means that it wins out in this area.

The maximum Thermal Design Power is the power in Watts that the CPU will consume in the worst case scenario. The lithography is the semiconductor manufacturing technology being used to create the CPU - the smaller this is, the more transistors that can be fit into the CPU, and the closer the connections. For both the lithography and the TDP, it is the lower the better, because a lower number means a lower amount of power is necessary to run the CPU, and consequently a lower amount of heat is produced.

The Celeron G550T 2.2GHz has a 30 Watt lower Maximum TDP than the APU A6-9550 4-Core. However, the APU A6-9550 4-Core was created with a 4 nm smaller manufacturing technology. Overall, by taking both into account, the Celeron G550T 2.2GHz is likely the CPU with the lower heat production and power requirements, by quite a wide margin.