AMD Athlon 300U vs AMD Ryzen 7 2800H

AMD Athlon 300U

The AMD Athlon 300U is a mobile entry level dual core SoC that was announced in January 2019. It combines two Zen cores (with SMT / Hyperthreading so running 4 threads) clocked at 2.4 - 3.3 GHz with a Radeon RX Vega 3 graphics card with 3 CUs (192 Shaders) clocked at up to 1000 MHz. Specified at 15 Watt TDP, the SoC is intended for thin mid-range laptops. It is quite similar to the AMD Ryzen 3 3200U (2.6 - 3.5 GHz).

Compared to the Picasso APUs of the Ryzen 3000 series, the Athlon 300U is still based on the first generation of the 2000 series. Only the PRO variant is based on the new Zen+ microarchitecture that should lead to a 3% IPS (performance per clock) improvement.

The integrated dual-channel memory controller supports up to DDR4-2400 memory. As the features of the Picasso APUs are the same compared to the Raven Ridge predecessors, we point to our Raven Ridge launch article.

In contrast to the faster quad-core Picasso APUs, the Athlon 300U only supports 3 instead of 4 displays in total.

Performance wise, the Athlon 300 should be slightly slower than the Ryzen 3 2200U (2.5 - 3.4 GHz Dual Core with SMT).

AMD Ryzen 7 2800H

The AMD Ryzen 7 2800H is a mobile SoC that was announced late 2018. It is intended for mid-sized to big laptops and combines four Zen cores (8 threads) clocked at 3.3 (base) - 3.8 GHz (boost) with a Radeon RX Vega 11 Mobile graphics card with 11 CUs (704 Shaders). The integrated dual-channel memory controller supports up to DDR4-3200 memory.

Compared to the older Ryzen 7 2700U for slim and light laptops, the 2800H offers a higher TDP (45 Watt versus 15 Watt), higher clocked memory, a higher base clock (3.4 versus 2.2 GHz), and a faster integrated GPU.

More information on Raven Ridge can be found in our launch article.

The performance should be slightly better than the Ryzen 7 2700U due to the higher TDP and base clock speed. Especially longer loads should profit from this. Due to the high TDP (configurable from 35 - 54 Watt), the Ryzen 7 2800H is best suited for bigger laptops.

Power consumption

This Ryzen 7 has a default TDP (also known as the long-term power limit) of 45 W, a value that laptop manufacturers are free to change to anything between 35 W and 54 W with clock speeds and performance changing correspondingly. All the values are rather high, making a high-performance cooling solution with two or three fans pretty much a necessity.

The CPU is built on an old, as of late 2022, 14 nm process for subpar energy efficiency.