AMD Athlon Silver 3050U Budget Laptop Processor

The AMD Athlon Silver 3050U is a budget-friendly laptop processor. It’s geared toward the usual home and office computing tasks. The processor provides basic performance, but good enough for fairly smooth web browsing, work on MS Office-type documents, e-mails, and similar.

Besides the Athlon Silver 3050U, AMD offers the Athlon Gold 3150U, which is slightly faster. These processors with two cores and two computing threads per core are similar to the AMD Ryzen 3 3200U / 3250U with four cores but a single thread per core.

As for graphics rendering, which is important for gaming performance, the Athlon Silver 3050U features a very basic Radeon integrated graphics processor with only two graphics processing cores, as opposed to three on the Athlon Gold and Ryzen 3. All of these graphics processors support only light gaming and the Athlon Silver 3050U is the slowest one among the trio in this aspect.

AMD Athlon Silver 3050U CPU Benchmark

AMD Athlon Silver 3050U Benchmark

Note: The benchmark scores of the listed processors are averages measured across various devices with these processors. The scores and real-world performance of the AMD Athlon Silver 3050U and compared CPUs may vary depending on the notebooks' other components, settings, cooling, and other factors. However, the benchmark results are good indicators of the processors' performance.

Specifications of the AMD Athlon Silver 3050U

Here are the most important specs of the AMD Athlon Silver 3050U:

Processor Name

AMD Athlon Silver 3050U

CPU Family

AMD Athlon "Raven Ridge"

Number of Cores

Dual-core / 2 computing threads per core

CPU Clock Speed

2.3 – 3.2 GHz

Cache Size

5MB

Memory Support

DDR4 (2400 MHz max. speed)

Integrated Graphics

AMD Radeon Graphics

Power Consumption

15W

Production Technology

12-nanometer

Typical Use

Affordable laptops & 2-in-1 PCs
Mainstream laptops & 2-in-1 PCs

Notable Technologies

Virtualization – allows the processor to run multiple operating systems simultaneously using virtual platforms

Year of Release

2020

Published on September 12, 2020

User Reviews and Q&A on the AMD Athlon Silver 3050U

Below you can read and submit user reviews, questions, and answers about the processor. Thank you for your contribution.

Current rating: 3 out of 5 stars
  1. Brian

    my laptop have 2 slots for ram, 1 is built in 4gb 2400mhz, can I add 16gb 3200mhz or 16gb 2666mhz? what is the compatible?

    • Dan

      The mhz speed isn’t as important as memory type, such as DDR3 and DDR4 which are not compatible. What memory type is your laptop memory slot? Also keep in mind that lower-end laptop processors have a low upper memory limit – it may be for instance 8GB in total, so if you add 16GB to 4GB on a laptop with a low-end CPU, you may end up with only 8GB of available RAM in total.

  2. Question

    Luna

    is athlon silver 3050u good for designing? can i use figma, adobe xd, etc with it?

    • Dan

      This is not a good CPU for design software. For that purpose look for the AMD Ryzen or Intel Core series CPUs combined with at least 8GB RAM and SSD type storage.

  3. 4 out of 5 Great

    Somi

    This processor is great for the price. It is enough for watching movies and web browsing. I have a Lenovo laptop with SSD + 8GB RAM and Windows 11 and it is really fast. Not for gaming but but at the price that is expected.

  4. Question

    Cal

    This CPU and Vega 2 graphics can handle displaying 4k 60Hz videos on TV?

    • Nathan

      I’m on a laptop with this cpu right now. It can play 4k video but definitely will lag at times, especially during windows updates

  5. 1 out of 5 Hang

    Rahul

    Multitasking is hard, silver 3050u only for childs

    • Pigarc

      just upgrade the ram then

  6. Question

    Mantosh Roy

    Hp15s- eq1xxx laptop with 4gb ram and amd silver 3050u is good for beginners level of coding ?
    If I upgraded ram and SSD.

    • Dan

      Hi, these are very basic components, and aren’t recommended for serious programming. Especially if you use virtualization or other heavier software. I would suggest at least Intel Core i3 / i5 or AMD Ryzen 3 / 5 processor, at least 8GB RAM, and SSD (coding files are not generally big so you don’t need a lot of storage space, but SSD is a must if you don’t want slowness of HDDs ).
      On the other hand, the specs you mentioned can be used for some basic coding, like simple programming in Visual Basic or text editors. But, for sure it won’t be as snappy as on the Core i3 / i5 or Ryzen 3 / 5.

  7. 4 out of 5 An OK budget laptop for simple task. Suprisingly easy to upgrade RAM & SSD

    Mikey

    I like the fact it is easy to upgrade both RAM and SSD. I Upgraded the RAM to 16G and the SSD to 1T. It is not capable of being useful. I have the 1T SSD partitioned into 2 512G and installed UBUNTU Linux got dual boot. The Windows partition is used for surfing and running simple tasks, while the Linux partition is more more robust work: GIMP, Programming, etc.

    If you are looking for a good basic laptop for school or home, this should work well – provided you upgrade the drive to something large enough to be useful. Having more memory is also helpful.

  8. Question

    Unknown

    Dell laptop Amd athlon silver 3050 U 8+512 or ryzen 3500 U 8+512 or i3-1115 G 4+256 is better for student who needs to use google chrome, microsoft apps ?

    • Dan

      If those 8+512 and 4+512 are 8GB / 4GB RAM and 512GB SSD (I hope 512 are SSDs not much slower HDDs), then those two 8GB RAM variants are better. The AMD Ryzen 5 3500U and Intel Core i3-1115G4 perform similar and are excellent for your tasks, while the Athlon 3050 is noticeably slower processor (but still can be used for light computing like chrome or Office apps). All in all, the Ryzen 5 3500U 8GB+512GB is the best variant among the three, if it’s with SSD.

    • mazhar

      worst laptop hanging too much

  9. Question

    Aviraj khenat

    Can I upgrade to any higher proccesoor

    • Dan

      Unfortunately, no. Laptop processors aren’t usually upgradeable.

    • JohnIL

      Most laptops today have CPU’s soldered to motherboard. If that model had a upgraded CPU you could possibly swap out motherboards if you could find one with the better CPU. It would probably not be a significant increase in performance though. I believe the 3250u does have hyperthreading which would process 4 threads instead of two with 3050u. However, looking at benchmarks this didn’t make much of a difference.

    • JohnIL

      Correcting my post the 3250u has four cores no hyperthreading and the 3150u has two cores and hyperthreading. Basically having same Vega graphics as well. Not for gaming, but for general tasks and limited performance in any configuration.

  10. Question

    Naveen

    Iam using athlon silver 3050 model, Can I upgrade HDD to SSD,

    • Dan

      It doesn’t depend on the processor. Generally, 2.5″ HDDs can be replaced by 2.5″ SSDs. In addition, you can check whether your laptop also has an M.2 slot supporting M.2 SSDs. If that’s the case you can just add an M.2 SSD without removing the HDD.

    • Casper

      Does he have a build in wi fi

  11. Question

    bs

    WINDOWS 7 COMPATIBLE?

    • mohamed miyas

      amd athlon silver 3050u with radeon graphics 2.30 ghz support fifa 18 game

  12. athlon silever

    sagar surse

    dont suggest to buy athlon sliver processer laptop
    im buy new laptop last month but many time laptop very slow , slow start and restart many problem , im using pycharm , data software software this not support those software

  13. Question

    Efra Mahmood

    Is AMD athalon silver 3050 u good for online classes?

    • AmdRyzen9(User)

      Yes Really good

  14. 3 out of 5 Basic notebook for basic task

    JohnIL

    This is a duel core mobile low powered CPU. It’s not even close to having the performance for editing video, 3D gaming or any other CPU intensive task. But it’s plenty fast for web surfing, watching video streams, and doing Office work. If you want more you need to invest in the Ryzen platform such as a Ryzen 3 or 5 series. I would compare this CPU to a Celeron or Pentium Intel family of CPU’s.

  15. Question

    Dawn

    Is it compatible w iOS, android, and most printers

    • Dan

      Hi, this processor is designed for “desktop” operating systems like Windows and Linux. It can run mobile operating systems (OS) like iOS and Android via emulation programs. If your question is regarding the processor’s support for peripheral connectivity with iOS and Android phones (ie connection via USB cable), it is not a processor question. It’s ratrher a question whether OS supports that and in case of Windows and (I think most Linux distributions) it does. The same applies to printers.

    • mat

      this laptop suck for gaming even u make overclock it still suck it only can use for shit in office , hate when they say it good for gaming but it totally suck

    • Parth

      That’s true I had to do a lot of tweaks for it to run decently well

  16. Question

    Lala

    Does it support directx 12?

    • amk

      which amd driver should i use for my laptop amd athlon silver

  17. Question

    ramcharan

    what is its core like i3,i5

    • Dan

      It rather equivalent of Intel’s Pentium series, which is a bit weaker than the Core i3. It’s closer to the Core i3 than i5.

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