AMD Ryzen 5 2600 vs AMD Athlon Silver 3050e

AMD Ryzen 5 2600

The AMD Ryzen 5 2600 is a six-core desktop processor that can handle twelve threads simultaneously thanks to Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT). This technology is equivalent to Intel's Hyper-Threading. Launched in April 2018, the Ryzen 5 2600 is the second fastest Ryzen 5 processor and is much more economical than its flagship sibling. The Ryzen 5 2600 has a 65 W TDP, which is nearly 40% more efficient than the 95 W TDP Ryzen 5 2600 X. This energy efficiency comes at a cost to performance though.

The Ryzen 5 2600 has a base clock speed of 3.4 GHz, which can be boosted by Extended Frequency Range (XFR) up to 3.9 GHz. The power gain is still high in multi-threaded applications, although this is some way off the Ryzen 5 2600X. The Ryzen 5 2600 benefits from AMD's new Zen+ architecture, with a greater number of instructions per cycle (IPC) and higher clock speeds than last year's Zen chips. The Ryzen 5 2600's six cores are divided into two clusters that are connected by Infinity Fabric, a subset of HyperTransport. Each cluster has its own L3 cache.

The Ryzen 5 2600 has good performance in games. Moreover, the Ryzen 5 2600 has a higher base clock than the Ryzen 7 2700. Seeing as many games currently lack multi-core support, this means that the Ryzen 5 2600 performs better than its technically superior sibling.

Detailed information, benchmarks and values can be found in our review of the Ryzen 5 2600.

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.