AMD Athlon Silver 3050U vs AMD Ryzen 7 3780U vs AMD Ryzen 3 3350U

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.

AMD Ryzen 7 3780U

The AMD Ryzen 7 3780U,a Microsoft Surface edition chip, is a mobile SoC that was announced in Oct 2019 as part of the new Surface Laptop 15. It combines four Zen+ cores (8 threads) clocked at 2.3 - 4 GHz with a Radeon RX Vega 11 graphics card with 11 CUs (704 Shaders) clocked at up to 1400 MHz. Specified at 15 Watt TDP, the SoC is intended for thin mid-range laptops.

Compared to the similar Ryzen 7 3700U, the 3780U offers the faster Vega 11 instead of the Vega 10 GPU.

The Picasso SoCs use the Zen+ microarchitecture with slight improvements that should lead to a 3% IPC (performance per clock) improvements. Furthermore, the 12nm process allows higher clock rates at similar power consumptions.

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.

Performance

While we have not tested a single system powered by the 3780U as of August 2023, it's safe to expect the chip to be about as fast as the Ryzen 7 3700U, as far as multi-thread performance is concerned.

AMD Ryzen 3 3350U

The AMD Ryzen 3 3350U is a mobile SoC that was announced in January 2019. It combines four Zen+ cores (no SMT / Hyperthreading so only 4 threads) clocked at 2.1 - 3.5 GHz with a Radeon RX Vega 6 graphics card with 6 CUs (384 Shaders) clocked at up to 1200 MHz. Specified at 15 Watt TDP, the SoC is intended for thin mid-range laptops. Compared to the similar Ryzen 3 3300U, the 3350U offers the same specifications according to AMD.

The Picasso SoCs use the Zen+ microarchitecture with slight improvements that should lead to a 3% IPS (performance per clock) improvements. Furthermore, the 12nm process allows higher clock rates at similar power consumptions.

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 3 3350U should be similar to the Ryzen 5 2500U (2 - 3.6 GHz but with SMT).