AMD Ryzen 3 4300U vs Intel Core i7-10610U

AMD Ryzen 3 4300U

The AMD Ryzen 3 4300U is a processor for thin and light laptops based on the Renoir family. The 4300U integrates four cores based on the Zen 2 microarchitecture (quad core CPU). They are clocked at 2.7 (guaranteed base clock) to 3.7 GHz (Turbo) without SMT / Hyperthreading support (4 threads). The chip is manufactured on the modern 7 nm TSMC process and partly thanks to it AMD advertises a 2x improved performance per Watt for the Renoir chips. Compared to the faster Ryzen 5 4000 CPUs (e.g., Ryzen 5 4600U), the Ryzen 3 only offers 4 cores and lower Turbo clock speeds.

In addition to the four CPU cores, the APU also has the Radeon RX Vega 5 integrated graphics card with 5 CUs and up to 1400 MHz. The dual channel memory controller supports DDR4-3200 and energy efficient LPDDR4-4266 RAM. Furthermore, 4 MB of Level 3 cache can be found on the chip. See our hub page on the Renoir Processors for more information.

Performance

The average 4300U in our database matches the Core i5-1035G4 and the Core i5-11300H, both quad-core chips, in multi-thread performance. Technically a lower mid-range CPU, this Ryzen is light years ahead of Intel Pentiums and AMD Athlons that so many sub-US$500 laptops ship with.

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

Power consumption

The Ryzen 3 series chip has a default TDP (also known as the long-term power limit) of 15 W, a value that laptop manufacturers are free to change to anything between 10 W and 25 W with performance and clock speeds changing accordingly as a result. By going for the lowest value, it is possible to build passively cooled tablets, laptops, mini-PCs around this APU.

The 7 nm TSMC process the Ryzen 3 4300U is manufactured on makes for average, as of mid 2023, energy efficiency.

Intel Core i7-10610U

The Intel Core i7-10610U is a power efficient quad-core SoC for notebooks based on the Comet Lake (CML-U) generation and was announced in August 2019. Compared to the similar Whiskey Lake processors (e.g. Core i7-8665U), the only difference is support for higher memory speeds (DDR4-2666 vs 2400) and two additional cores in the top model (not in this i7-10610U). The processor cores are clocked between 1.8 and 4.9 GHz (unverified). Thanks to Hyper-Threading 8 threads can be used. More information on Comet Lake and all the models and articles on it can be found here.

Compared to the similar Core i7-10510U, the 10610U supports vPro.

The integrated graphics adapter however is still the same as in the previous generations. It should be still called Intel UHD Graphics 620 and clock from 300 - 1150 MHz in the i7. Furthermore, the SoC integrates a VP9 and H.265 de- and encoder and an integrated dual channel DDR4-2666 / LPDDR4x 2933 / LPDDR3-2133 memory controller.

Performance

The average 10610U in our database is in the same league as the Core i5-1035G1 and also the Core i5-8257U, as far as multi-thread benchmark scores are concerned.

Thanks to its decent cooling solution and a long-term power limit of 25 W, the HP ZBook Firefly 14 G7 is among the fastest laptops built around the 10610U that we know of. It can be about 30% faster in CPU-bound workloads than the slowest system featuring the same chip in our database, as of August 2023.

Power consumption

This Core i7 has a default TDP of 15 W (also known as the long-term power limit). Laptop manufacturers are free to change that value to anything between 10 W and 25 W, with clock speeds and performance changing accordingly. Perhaps more importantly, short-term power consumption of 10th gen Comet Lake U processors can be as high as 80 W or even 90 W, making passively cooled designs rather unlikely to appear.

Core i7-10610U is manufactured on an old, as of late 2022, 14 nm Intel process for subpar energy efficiency.