AMD Athlon Silver 3050U vs Intel Processor N97

AMD Athlon Silver 3050U

The AMD Athlon Silver 3050U is a mobile processor for thin and light entry level laptops. It is based on the Picasso series (e.g. Ryzen 3000U APUs) and offers two Zen cores clocked at 2.3 to 3.2 GHz without SMT (two threads at once) and 4 MB of L3 Cache. The integrated graphics card is called Radeon RX Vega 2 and offers only 2 CUs (128 shaders) clocked at up to 1,100 MHz.

In Chromebooks, AMD calles the APU AMD Athlon Silver 3050C, but with the exact same specifications (and performance).

Performance

We have not tested a single system built around the 3050U, as of August 2023. Expect the chip to be just a few percentage points slower than the Athlon 3150U (two Zen cores, 4 threads, up to 3.3 GHz). This kind of performance should suffice for most day-to-day tasks but not much more than that.

Power consumption

This Athlon series chip has a default TDP of 15 W (also known as the long-term power limit). Laptop makers are free to change that to anything between 12 W and 25 W with clock speeds and peformance changing accordingly as a result. Either way, that's a tad too high to allow for passively cooled designs.

Last but not the least, the APU is built with a 14 nm process leading to poor, as of early 2023, energy efficiency.

Intel Processor N97

The Intel Processor N97 is an entry-level mobile CPU for thin and light laptops from the Alder Lake-N series. It was announced in early 2023 and offers no performance cores and 4 of the 8 efficient cores (E-cores, Gracemont architecture). The chip does not support HyperThreading and clocks with up to 3.7 GHz. The performance of the E-cores should be similar to old Skylake cores (compare to the Core i7-6700HQ). All cores can use up to 6 MB L3-cache. 

Performance

The performance should be between the Intel Processor N100 and Intel Processor N200 and clearly below the Core i3-N300 and N305 due to the reduced core count. 

Features

The Alder Lake-N chips only support single channel memory with up to DDR5-4800, DDR4-3200 or LPDDR5-4800. The chip also supports Quick Sync and AV1 decoding (most likely same engine as in Alder Lake). Furthermore, Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2 are partly integrated (but no Thunderbolt). External chips can be connected via PCIe Gen3 x9 (via the PCH).

The integrated graphics adapter is based on the Xe-architecture and offers only 24 of the 32 EUs (Execution Units) operating at 1200 MHz. Due to the single channel memory, low clock speeds, and low shader count, the gaming performance of the iGPU is very limited.

Power consumption

The N97 has a base power consumption of 12 W and therefore double the amount of the N100. The CPU is built with a further improved 10nm SuperFin process at Intel (called Intel 7).