AMD Ryzen 5 2500U vs AMD Ryzen 5 1500X vs AMD Athlon Silver 3050e

AMD Ryzen 5 2500U

The AMD Ryzen 5 2500U is a mobile APU for thin and light laptops that was announced in October 2017. It includes four Zen cores clocked at 2 to 3.6 GHz and offers 4 MB L3-Cache. The integrated graphics card is called Radeon RX Vega 8 and offers 8 CUs (512 Shaders) clocked at up to 1100 MHz. The TDP is configurable between 12 and 25 Watt (15 Watt nominal). More information on Raven Ridge can be found in our launch article.

AMD Ryzen 5 1500X

The AMD Ryzen 5 1500X is a desktop processor with 4 cores and Hyper Threading (SMT). It is the fastest Ryzen 5 quad-core processor in the beginning of 2017, but the 65-watt TDP is similar to the hexa-core Ryzen 5 1600.

The Ryzen 5 1500X has a base frequency of 3.5 GHz and can reach up to 3.7 GHz via Turbo (up to 2 cores) or 3.9 GHz via XFR (also up to 2 cores).

The processor based on the Zen architecture is not fully convincing in games. AMD blames missing optimizations from the gaming producers.

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.