AMD Athlon Silver 3050e vs AMD Ryzen 5 3450U

AMD Athlon Silver 3050e

The AMD Athlon Silver 3050e (Codename Dali) is a mobile APU that integrates two Zen cores (with SMT, therefore 4 threads) clocked at 1.4 to 2.8 GHz. The TDP is specified at 6 Watt and therefore the chip can be passively cooled. The integrated Radeon graphics card offers 3 CUs at up to 1000 MHz (Radeon RX Vega 3). The dual channel memory controller supports only DDR4-2400. The chip is manufactured on a 14 nm node and officially counted to the 3000 series of mobile processors.

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

Performance

The average 3050e in our database is in the same league as the Celeron N4120, as far as multi-thread benchmark scores are concerned. In other words, a slight amount of the AMD Zen magic has not helped this chip much. Its performance can be described as fairly slow, as of mid 2023.

Your mileage may vary depending on how high the CPU power limits are.

Power consumption

Much like Intel's N-class Celeron and Pentium processors, the AMD 3050e has a 6 W TDP (also known as the long-term power limit). This is not much at all and thus good enough for passively cooled tablets, laptops, mini-PCs.

This APU is built with a 14 nm process making for poor, as of early 2023, energy efficiency.

AMD Ryzen 5 3450U

The AMD Ryzen 5 3450U is a mobile SoC that was announced in Q2 2020 as a refresh. It combines four Zen+ cores (8 threads) clocked at 2.1 GHz to 3.5 GHz (-200 MHz versus 3500U) with a Radeon RX Vega 8 iGPU with 8 CUs (512 Shaders) clocked at up to 1200 MHz.

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.

Performance

The average 3450U in our database is in the same league as the Core i3-1115G4 and also the Ryzen 3 4300U, as far as multi-thread benchmark scores are concerned. This is a better-than-expected result for an aging lower mid-range chip that is the 3450U, as of mid 2022.

Your mileage may vary depending on how high the CPU power limits are and how competent the cooling solution of your system is.

Power consumption

The Ryzen 5 has a default TDP (also known as the long-term power limit) of 15 W, a value that laptop manufacturers are allowed to change to anything between 12 W and 35 W if required with clock speeds and performance changing correspondingly. These values are fairly high, making active cooling solutions something of a necessity.

The CPU is built with a somewhat old, as of late 2022, 12 nm process for lower-than-average energy efficiency.