AMD Athlon Silver 3050U vs AMD Ryzen 5 3500U

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) or the same dual core die of the desktop Athlon 3000 and offers two Zen or Zen+ cores clocked at 2.3 to 3.2 GHz without SMT (two threads at once) and 4 MB L3-Cache. The integrated graphics card is called Radeon RX Vega 2 and offers only 2 CUs (128 Shaders) clocked at up to 1000 MHz. The TDP is configurable between 12 and 25 Watt (15 Watt nominal).

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

The performance should be slightly below the AMD Athlon 300U and Athlon Pro 300U due to the lower clock speeds and missing SMT. Also the GPU offers one CU less and should be significantly slower.

AMD Ryzen 5 3500U

The AMD Ryzen 5 3500U is a mobile SoC that was announced in January 2019. It combines four Zen+ cores (8 threads) clocked at 2.1 GHz to 3.7 GHz with a Radeon RX Vega 8 iGPU with 8 CUs (512 Shaders) clocked at up to 1200 MHz. Specified at 15 Watt TDP, the SoC is intended for thin mid-range laptops. In Chromebooks, AMD calles the APU AMD Ryzen 5 3500C, but the specifications (and performance) are the same.

The Picasso SoC uses the Zen+ microarchitecture with slight improvements that should lead to a 3% IPS (performance per clock) improvements. Furthermore, the 12 nm process allows for higher clocks at similar power consumption.

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.

AMD states that the Picasso APUs are about 8% faster than the predecessors. Therefore, the Ryzen 5 3500U should be ahead the Ryzen 5 2500U (2 - 3.6 GHz) and nearly on par with the Ryzen 7 2700U (2.2 - 3.8 GHz). The performance in our tests depends a lot on the used TDP settings and cooling system. Looking at our Cinebench R15 loop you see a huge difference on the sustained performance, but not as high as for the Ryzen 7 3700U. The average Ryzen 5 3500U for example is even slightly faster than an average Ryzen 7 3700U in our tests (performance rating). Compared with Intel CPUs, the 3500U is on par with a Intel Core i5-8265U (Whiskey Lake Quad-Core 1.6 - 3.9 GHz).