AMD Ryzen 7 3780U vs AMD Athlon Silver 3050U

AMD Ryzen 7 3780U

The AMD Ryzen 7 3780U (Microsoft Surface Edition) is a mobile SoC that was announced in Oct 2019 as part of the new Surface Laptop 15. It combines four Zen+ cores (8 threads) clocked at 2.3 - 4 GHz with a Radeon RX Vega 11 graphics card with 11 CUs (704 Shaders) clocked at up to 1400 MHz. Specified at 15 Watt TDP, the SoC is intended for thin mid-range laptops.

Compared to the similar Ryzen 7 3700U, the 3780U offers the faster Vega 11 instead of the Vega 10 GPU.

The Picasso SoCs use the Zen+ microarchitecture with slight improvements that should lead to a 3% IPC (performance per clock) improvements. Furthermore, the 12nm process allows higher clock rates at similar power consumptions.

The integrated dual-channel memory controller supports up to DDR4-2400 memory. As the features of the Picasso APUs are the same compared to the Raven Ridge predecessors, we point to our Raven Ridge launch article.

AMD states that the Picasso APUs are about 8% faster than the predecessors. Therefore, the Ryzen 7 3780U should be slightly ahead the Ryzen 7 2700U. In our benchmark the Ryzen 7 3700U and therefore also the 3780U could not pull ahead much compared to the average Ryzen 7 2700U.

AMD Athlon Silver 3050U

The AMD Athlon Silver 3050U is a mobile processor for thin and light entry level laptops. It is based on the Picasso series (e.g. Ryzen 3000U APUs) or the same dual core die of the desktop Athlon 3000 and offers two Zen or Zen+ cores clocked at 2.3 to 3.2 GHz without SMT (two threads at once) and 4 MB L3-Cache. The integrated graphics card is called Radeon RX Vega 2 and offers only 2 CUs (128 Shaders) clocked at up to 1000 MHz. The TDP is configurable between 12 and 25 Watt (15 Watt nominal).

In Chromebooks, AMD calles the APU AMD Athlon Silver 3050C, but with the exact same specifications (and performance).

The performance should be slightly below the AMD Athlon 300U and Athlon Pro 300U due to the lower clock speeds and missing SMT. Also the GPU offers one CU less and should be significantly slower.