Intel Pentium Gold 7505 vs AMD Athlon Silver 3050U

Intel Pentium Gold 7505

The Intel Pentium Gold 7505 is a power-efficient dual-core SoC for laptops and Ultrabooks based on the Tiger Lake-U generation that was announced in the third quarter of 2020. Unlike many other TGL-UP3 processors, the Pentium features an Infrastructure Processing Unit (Intel IPU). It integrates two Willow Cove processor cores (4 threads thanks to HyperThreading) clocked at 2 - 3.5 GHz (at 15 Watt TDP).

Another novelty is the integrated Xe graphics adapter based on the completely new Gen 12 architecture. It should offer a significantly higher performance compared to the older UHD Graphics G1 (Ice Lake).

Other improvements from Ice Lake are also integrated in Tiger Lake like the AI hardware acceleration and the partial integration of Thunderbolt and WiFi 6 in the chip.

Performance

The average 7505 in our database lags just slightly behind the N95, as far as multi-thread benchmark scores are concerned. In other words, this is an entry-level chip that's good enough for basic day-to-day activities only, as of late 2022.

Power consumption

This Pentium series chip has a default TDP (also known as the long-term power limit) of 15 W. Which is a tad too high to allow for passively cooled designs.

The Intel Pentium 7505 is built with Intel's 3rd generation 10 nm process marketed as SuperFin for low, as of mid 2023, energy efficiency.

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.