AMD Ryzen 5 2600 vs AMD Athlon Gold 3150U

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 Gold 3150U

The AMD Athlon Gold 3150U is a mobile processor for thin and light entry level laptops. It is based on the Dali series (Raven Ridge Dual Core) and offers two Zen cores clocked at 2.6 to 3.3 GHz with SMT (four threads at once) and 4 MB L3-Cache. The integrated graphics card is called Radeon RX Vega 3 and offers only 3 CUs (192 Shaders) clocked at up to 1000 MHz.

In Chromebooks, AMD calles the APU AMD Athlon Gold 3150C, but with the exact same specifications (and performance).

Performance

The average 3150U in our database is in the same league as the Core i3-10110U, as far as multi-thread benchmark scores are concerned. In other words, this is an entry-level chip, as of mid 2022. While not slow by any means, it is anything but fast, either.

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

Power consumption

The Athlon has a default TDP, also known as the long-term power limit, of 15 W that laptop makers are free to change to anything between 12 W and 25 W with clock speeds and performance changing accordingly as a result. Most will go for a higher value to reach higher performance levels. Either way, an active cooling solution will be needed to dissipate the heat.

The AMD 3150U is built with a 14 nm manufacturing process resulting in low, as of early 2023, energy efficiency.