Intel Pentium N4200 vs AMD A9-9425

Intel Pentium N4200

The Intel Pentium N4200 is an Apollo Lake family, quad-core, ultra-low-power processor (SoC) that saw the light of day in 2016. Its four cores run at 1.1 GHz to 2.5 GHz, with only 2.4 GHz available when all the cores are fully loaded; there is no Hyper-Threading here and thus no additional threads. This chip has a fairly competent integrated graphics solution, the Intel HD Graphics 505, and eats very little (~6 W).

Curiously enough, Intel keeps making and selling the Pentium as of early 2023.

Architecture

Just like other Celeron N, Celeron J, Pentium N, Pentium J processors, this Pentium is notable for its small die size. It is easy to manufacture, lowering the costs and enabling Intel to compete with various ARM-based products such as the Raspberry Pi series.

The Pentium N4200 features the Goldmont CPU microarchitecture that came to replace Silvermont (2013), bringing with it several welcome improvements. There is still no L3 cache to be found here, however, it now takes less cycles to perform many operations, making for a double-digit IPC improvement.

The Pentium is compatible with DDR3L-1866, LPDDR3-1866, LPDDR4-2400 RAM. Intel's guidelines state that up to 8 GB are supported; that being said, various forum users report that the CPU functions just fine if mated to 16 GB and even 32 GB of RAM. The chip features six PCI-Express 2.0 lanes for connecting various devices, meaning a four-lane NVMe SSD will not be able to deliver a data transfer rate of more than 2 GB/s. eMMC and SATA storage is supported natively, too.

This Intel CPU is Secure Boot-compatible; technically, it will have no issue running 64-bit Windows 11. However, Microsoft only allows Windows 11 to be installed on systems with CPUs released in 2017 or later, making 64-bit Windows 10 the only OS that the Pentium is officially compatible with.

Last but not the least, please keep in mind that this is not a user-replaceable CPU. It gets permanently soldered to the motherboard (BGA1296 socket interface).

Performance

The average N4200 in our database competes with the Core i5-3339Y, a power efficient chip launched in 2013, as far as multi-thread benchmark scores are concerned, with the (much less ancient) Celeron 6305 lurking a little behind the two. In other words, the Pentium is a slow processor suitable for the most basic tasks only. As of 2021, it is light years behind the latest processors making use of high-performance architectures, such as the Zen 2-powered AMD Ryzen 3 5300U.

The Acer Aspire ES 17 ES1-732 is among the fastest laptops built around the N4200 that we know of. It can be around 50% faster than the slowest system featuring the same CPU in our database, depending on the circumstances.

Graphics

The HD Graphics 505 (18 EUs) is a rather good iGPU, considering this is a lower-end SoC released in 2016 we are talking about. As far as the feature set is concerned, the HD 505 is not much different from the HD Graphics 520 or any other graphics adapter that full-blown six-generation Intel Core i3/i5/i7 chips have. This iGPU is compatible with DX12; it will drive up to 3 monitors simultaneously at up to 2160p60. It will also happily decode VP9 and AVC, the two codecs that YouTube mostly relies on as of 2021.

The UHD Graphics runs at up to 750 MHz. Its actual clock speed will be much lower than that, since the small power budget has to be shared between the iGPU and the CPU cores. Expect most games to run terrible, even ones that were released in 2012 or 2010.

Power consumption

Just like most other N-class Intel processors, the Pentium N4200 has a default TDP of 6 W (also known as the Power Limit 1), making it a great option for passively cooled systems. Increasing the PL1 by just one or two watts, which many systems built around Apollo Lake allow one to do, improves the chip's performance by a huge margin, speaking subjectively.

This Pentium is built with a 14 nm Intel process making for poor energy efficiency (considering 14 nm processes are really old as of mid 2022).

AMD A9-9425

The AMD A9-9425 is an entry-level chip from the Stoney-Ridge APU series for notebooks (7th APU generation), which was announced mid 2018. Compared to the one year older A9-9420, the 9425 has a 100 MHz higher CPU clock speed (base and boost) as well as a marginally faster iGPU. It integrates two CPU cores (one Excavator module with 2 integer and on FP unit) clocked at 3.1 GHz to 3.7 GHz. It also includes a Radeon R5 GPU with 192 shaders at up to 900 MHz as well as a single-channel DDR4-2133 memory controller, H.265 video decoder and chipset with all I/O ports.

Architecture

Stoney Ridge is the successor of the Carrizo architecture and the design is almost identical. Thanks to optimized manufacturing processes and more aggressive Boost behavior, however, the clocks are a bit higher at the same power consumption. The memory controller now also supports DDR4-RAM, in this case up to 2133 MHz. Stoney Ridge is the designation for the smaller dual-core and single-core chip, while Bristol Ridge is the bigger quad-core chip with dual-channel memory controller. More technical details are available in the following articles:

• AMD's Bristol Ridge and Stoney Ridge Architecture
• AMD: Bristol Ridge APUs announced

Performance

The average 9425 in our database proves to be a rather slow CPU, its multi-thread benchmark scores only just matching those of the Intel Core i3-4012Y. Much like it is with N-class Intel chips, expect a system built around an A9-9425 to perform poorly in all but the most basic tasks.

Graphics

The integrated Radeon R5 (Stoney Ridge) GPU has 192 active shader units (3 compute cores) clocked at up to 900 MHz. More details about the GPU are available in the linked articles above.

Power consumption

This A9 series chip has a default TDP of 15 W. Laptop makers are free to reduce that somewhat with 10 W being the minimum AMD-recommended value; clock speeds and performance will be reduced as a result. By going for the lowest value, it will be possible to build a passively cooled system around the APU.

Last but not the least, the AMD A9-9425 is manufactured on a 28 nm process for very, very low energy efficiency, as of 2022.